Blitz Games Studios

~ the goodbye ~

Blitz Games Studios announced its closure on 12 September 2013, after twenty-three years in Leamington Spa. It employed 175 people that morning. Fifty of them were kept on long enough to finish work already in progress, and the rest were let go. Philip Oliver, who had co-founded the company with his twin brother, told the BBC that the business had been unsustainable for several years. "Nobody is angry," he said. "Everybody's just very sad. We have tried everything."

This is a studio whose work you have probably held without reading its name. The brands on the boxes were SpongeBob SquarePants and Shrek; the publishers were Nickelodeon and THQ. A developer doing licensed work for hire gets a credit line and a logo on a loading screen, and that is most of its public existence. I knew several of these games and none of this company.

Philip and Andrew Oliver were born on 17 October 1967 in Trowbridge, and their first published game, Road Runner, was a type-in listing printed in Computer and Video Games when they were sixteen. The Codemasters years followed, and out of those came Dizzy, which ran from The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure in June 1987 to Crystal Kingdom Dizzy in December 1992. In 2017 Guinness World Records named them the most prolific 8-bit video game developers, for twenty-six commercial 8-bit titles between 1984 and 1992.

The company they built in 1990 changed names more than once. Wikipedia's infobox has it as Dizzy Enterprises Limited from 1990, its article on the twins says they started Interactive Studios that year, and the two are not reconciled anywhere. It was certainly Interactive Studios Limited by 1994, became Blitz Games in 2000 because the old name was too generic, and took the Studios suffix in 2008 once there was more than one of them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what 230 people were doing ~

By 2009 there were over 230 staff and the company had split into labels. The original Blitz Games line did family titles built on licensed characters: WarGames: Defcon 1 in 1998, then Glover and Action Man the year after. Frogger 2 and Chicken Run came in 2000, and Fuzion Frenzy arrived in the launch window of the first Xbox in 2001.

Blitz Arcade started in 2006 with thirty-five people for downloadable games, and its first work was an advergame series for Burger King that won a Cannes Titanium Grand Prix. Volatile Games handled the mature-rated end, which produced Reservoir Dogs in 2006, a BAFTA runner-up for best soundtrack and banned outright in Australia. TruSim did serious games, including an Interactive Trauma Trainer built with the University of Birmingham. Blitz 1UP gave independent developers free help getting to market from 2008 until it was folded into IndieCity in 2011. BlitzTech licensed the engine and toolchain the rest of it ran on.

~ the personal savings ~

The statement that went out with the closure is unusually specific about who it blames. "Major clients have felt unable to commit to investment in significant projects, others have changed strategy whilst appearing committed, and others have been slow to commit at all," Philip Oliver wrote. "We have also sustained the business for some time with our personal savings, but even those reserves have now been exhausted." Two owners putting their own savings into the business is not a detail a press release usually volunteers.

The rest of the diagnosis was structural. Mobile games had pushed the price of a game toward zero and taken development budgets down with it. Microsoft and Sony had both taken a long time to ship their next consoles, and a new console generation is when a work-for-hire studio gets paid. And one major client had gone under. The BBC report puts that client's collapse in 2011. The date is wrong. THQ filed for Chapter 11 on 19 December 2012 and its catalog was broken up at auction on 23 January 2013, eight months before Blitz announced.

~ £375,000 against £2.2 million ~

The liquidators reported on 24 October 2013 and the numbers are the clearest account of what happened. Assets were expected to realize about £375,000, against a deficiency of £2.2 million. Most of the hole was owed to the staff: £804,000 in wages and £562,000 in redundancy. The Royal Bank of Scotland was owed £314,000 and ranked ahead of almost everyone. Trade creditors were owed £406,000, over half of that to a single infrastructure firm, and after the wage arrears and the bank were settled there was nothing left for any of them.

Philip Oliver's comment at the time reads differently once you have seen those figures. "We have managed to weather numerous storms over the last two decades that have sadly seen the demise of many of our friends and colleagues across the industry," he said, "but the run of problems we've had to face over the last year is unlike any we've seen before. Frustrations with clients, the global economic crisis, and more than our fair share of simple bad luck have all conspired against us and we are no longer able to continue trading." Codemasters and Rebellion both said they would take on some of the people who had been let go.

The twins did not wait. A domain registration suggests the successor company existed within a week of the announcement, and Radiant Worlds opened in the same town with the Olivers, chief operating officer Richard Smithies and about fifty former Blitz staff. It spent four years on SkySaga: Infinite Isles for the Korean publisher Smilegate, which put the game on hold in August 2017. Rebellion bought the studio on 8 January 2018 and renamed it Rebellion Warwick, and the brothers left in February 2019. Blitz itself paid its bank and paid what it could of its own wages. There was nothing left for anybody else.

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