Black Hole Entertainment

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

~ the obituary ~

Black Hole Entertainment was started in Budapest in 2001 by seven young game enthusiasts, which is Wikipedia's phrasing and is worth keeping because it is the whole business plan. It also went by Black Hole Games. Over eleven years it shipped five things, every one of them strategy or arcade work built inside somebody else's brand, and none of them under its own publishing.

Armies of Exigo arrived at the end of 2004 through Electronic Arts, a real-time strategy game with a surface layer and an underground layer that you fought across at the same time. Warhammer: Mark of Chaos reached PC on 14 November 2006 and was the studio at its most visible. Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars followed in 2007 and the Battle March expansion in September 2008, reaching Xbox 360 on the second of that month and PC on the sixteenth.

Then Might & Magic Heroes VI, released in October 2011 after being pushed back from March, developed in collaboration with Ubisoft. I knew the Heroes series long before I knew this name, and I only learned the name from a defunct-company list in 2026. That is what co-development does. The box carries the publisher and the builders sit several screens into a credit roll.

~ the case file ~

~ seven founders and cinergi ~

The ownership line is the odd detail. From 2003 to 2007 the studio belonged to Cinergi Interactive, and Wikipedia records that Armies of Exigo was funded by Andy Vajna. That gave a studio with no capital of its own four years on somebody else's balance sheet, and three of its five releases came out inside that window. The article does not say why the ownership ended.

~ heroes vi ~

Heroes VI is the game that ended the company, and the mechanism is documented more thinly than you would expect for something this public. Wikipedia says the studio "was reported in various media to have gone bankrupt as a result of the nature of this development", and that "members of the company blamed Ubisoft for the mistake." The reports it cites are from April 2012, six months after release. The article gives no date for Ubisoft removing the studio from the project, so this page gives none either.

The death sentence itself is thinner still: "As of July 2012, the company is no longer operating." One of the sources Wikipedia cites, a post from the successor studio, says Black Hole "closed doors in 2011." The encyclopedia asserts July 2012 and never reconciles the two, so that is the date this page carries, with the 2011 claim sitting beside it unresolved.

~ primal game studio ~

The people did not scatter. Many of the former team went to Primal Game Studio, including three of the cofounders: Zoltán Zsuffa, listed there as Primal's co-founder and chief executive, with Sándor Jakus and Tamás Sándor beside him. Primal has no Wikipedia article of its own, so in the Black Hole article it appears as a red link holding the names of people who had built a company once already.

blackholegames.com no longer serves a readable page. A probe to it fails on the certificate before any content arrives, and the Hungarian address does not exist in DNS at all. What Wikipedia links as the official site is a Wayback capture from 14 August 2011, which is two months before Heroes VI shipped, so the last version of the studio's own homepage anybody preserved was written while the game that killed it was still unreleased.

Eleven years and five releases, none of them carrying the studio's name anywhere a buyer would look. Two Warhammer titles and a Heroes game came out of a Budapest office that started with seven people and an idea, and the thing it never managed to build was a reason for anyone outside the industry to learn what it was called.

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