Bitsquid

» see bitsquid.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Niklas Frykholm and Tobias Persson had both worked at Grin, the Stockholm studio that made Bionic Commando Rearmed before going under. In 2009 they started a company to build a game engine, backed in part by the owners of Fatshark, another Swedish developer. The engine was called Bitsquid and the design goal was to be small. It used Lua for scripting and kept the C++ core lean enough that programmers could actually read it, which was not the proposition the large commercial engines were making at the time.

In April 2010 Bitsquid and Fatshark put out a technology demo called Stone Giant that people downloaded to make their graphics cards suffer, and console support followed that autumn. Fatshark shipped Hamilton's Great Adventure in 2011, the first real game on the engine. PlayStation 4 support arrived in 2013. The customer list stayed mostly Swedish and mostly within arm's reach of the founders, which is how a two-engineer engine company survives at all.

Autodesk bought Bitsquid in June 2014. For Fatshark the sale was transformative in a straightforward way: the money funded Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, the studio's first self-published game at that scale. For the engine it meant becoming part of a toolchain, wired into Maya and 3ds Max, and getting a new name.

~ the case file ~

~ the autodesk years ~

Stingray launched at GDC Europe on 3 August 2015. Autodesk sold it by monthly subscription, sometimes bundled with its other software, and aimed it at small studios that could not stomach the alternatives. The press at the time wondered aloud whether this was a serious threat to Unity and Unreal.

It was not. Unity and Unreal had the documentation and the hiring pool, and an engine is one of the few products where the size of the community is itself the feature. In June 2017 Autodesk folded Stingray into 3ds Max as a plugin called 3ds Max Interactive, which is what a company does when it has stopped believing in a product but not yet written it off. Version 1.9 shipped in August 2017 and was the last.

~ 7 january 2018 ~

In December 2017 Autodesk announced the end of sale and the end of development for Stingray as a standalone product, with the reason stated plainly in the FAQ: it could not compete with Unreal and Unity. The trade press carried it on 14 December. The effective date was 7 January 2018. The plugin lineage lasted a while longer and 3ds Max Interactive was itself discontinued on 30 March 2022.

~ the posthumous hit ~

On 8 February 2024, Arrowhead Game Studios released Helldivers 2. It sold in enormous numbers, it was the thing everyone was playing that spring, and it was built on Stingray. Arrowhead had started the game before the shutdown and kept going on an engine that no longer had a vendor or anyone to file a bug with. Chief executive Johan Pilestedt confirmed production had begun before 2018, and the line that stuck was the one about the engineering team: they had to do everything with no support.

I knew Helldivers 2 the way everyone did, as a game, and I had no idea what it ran on until I looked this up. That is normally the correct relationship to have with an engine. It is worth noticing anyway that the single most successful title in this technology's history came out six years after its owner declared it uncompetitive and stopped answering the phone. Frykholm and Persson went off and built another engine called The Machinery, which was also short-lived.

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