Bizarre Creations

» see bizarrecreations.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Bizarre Creations was a Liverpool studio that spent the 2000s building the official Xbox driving experience. Project Gotham Racing 1 launched alongside the original Xbox in November 2001. PGR2 followed in 2003, PGR3 in 2005 on the 360, PGR4 in 2007. Inside PGR2 there was a tiny vector-graphics minigame called Geometry Wars, which became a standalone breakout hit on Xbox Live Arcade in 2005 and an outsized cultural footprint relative to its development cost.

Activision bought the studio on September 26, 2007 for $107.4 million, just before the Halo-Call-of-Duty consolidation began squeezing mid-size developers. The pitch was for Bizarre to deliver a flagship racing title that could compete with Need for Speed. That title was Blur, a power-up racer released in May 2010. It sold around one million copies against an Activision target several times higher. James Bond: Blood Stone shipped in November 2010 and also missed targets. On January 20, 2011 Activision announced the studio's closure, which was completed by February 18. Roughly 200 jobs went.

I was not in the Xbox 360 ecosystem during this run. PC was my platform, mostly because the import economics of consoles in Turkey in the mid-2000s made them a thing other people had. PGR was not a series I played, Geometry Wars I tried briefly through a friend's account. The closure barely surfaced in my feeds at the time. I learned the studio's history later, mostly through Lucid Games coverage when the alumni regrouped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what they made ~

Metropolis Street Racer for Dreamcast in 2000 was the predecessor. It introduced the Kudos system, a scoring rule that rewarded driving with style instead of just speed. Microsoft liked it enough to fund the sequel, which became Project Gotham Racing. The Kudos mechanic carried across the four-game PGR run and became the studio's signature.

Geometry Wars deserves its own paragraph. It started as a tech demo for the PGR2 garage. A developer used it to test particle effects. Players found it inside the garage screen and started playing it instead of the actual racing game. Microsoft asked for a standalone version. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved launched on Xbox Live Arcade in November 2005 at the absolute peak of XBLA's twin-stick-shooter renaissance and sold extremely well for its cost.

~ the activision years ~

Buying a developer to keep it making the same niche game is not what publishers do with $107 million. Activision wanted scale. Blur was the scale pitch: a racing title with multiplayer hooks, mass-market UI, power-ups, an MTV-style soundtrack. It launched within weeks of Split/Second and a month before Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. All three games competed for the same shrinking arcade-racing audience. Blur sold about a million copies, which would have been a success ten years earlier and was a failure under Activision's 2010 thresholds.

James Bond: Blood Stone came out in November 2010 with similar reception. By the time Activision pulled the plug in January 2011, the studio had also been working on a Geometry Wars sequel and a James Bond pitch that never shipped.

~ the next chapter ~

Lucid Games formed within a week of the closure announcement, taking most of the senior Bizarre staff and continuing in Liverpool. Lucid has shipped Switchblade, Destruction AllStars, and the rebooted Geometry Wars in different forms. A separate splinter, Hogrocket, attempted a mobile-first studio in 2011 and folded the following year. The Kudos system lives on in nearly every modern arcade racer that rewards driving line over raw speed. The studio itself does not.

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