Blue Tongue Entertainment

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

~ the eulogy ~

Blue Tongue made console games, mostly for consoles I did not own. That is the honest distance here. Turkey through the 2000s was a PC country by default, and a well reviewed Wii platformer was not something that turned up anywhere near my orbit.

The studio started in Melbourne on 13 October 1995, founded by Chris Mosely and Andrew Heath. It did web development work first and moved into games almost immediately. AFL Finals Fever came out on 9 June 1996 and reached number three on the Australian software chart, which for a first game in a market that size is about as well as it goes.

Riding Star in 1998 was the first thing they sold internationally, ported out to the PlayStation and the Game Boy. They built their own engine, called TOSHI, and ran most of what followed on it. Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis in 2003 is probably the pre-THQ game people outside Australia actually played.

Operation Genesis is the single point of contact I will claim, and only as a name that circulated. A park builder attached to a film license was the sort of PC game that traveled anywhere, which is exactly the difference between it and the rest of the studio's catalog.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

THQ bought Blue Tongue on 17 November 2004, and for the next four years the studio was a licensed-work shop. Nicktoons games and film tie-ins, one after another, delivered on schedule. Competent contract development, the kind of output that keeps a studio funded without ever making its name mean anything to a player.

Then in 2008 they got an original game. de Blob was a Wii platformer about repainting a city that had been drained of color, and it landed far better than anything a THQ satellite studio was expected to land. Official Nintendo Magazine gave it 92 percent and a gold award. IGN handed it a set of Wii-specific awards at the end of that year, best platform game among them.

~ the day it died ~

de Blob 2 shipped in February 2011 across three consoles and did respectably without repeating the first game's reception. Six months later THQ announced a restructuring, and on 10 August 2011 Blue Tongue closed. THQ Studio Australia in Brisbane closed the same week. THQ's entire Australian operation ended inside one announcement.

THQ itself had about eighteen months left. It filed for bankruptcy in December 2012 and was broken up and sold off the following January. Blue Tongue was one of the early cuts at a company that was already going under, and the de Blob rights went with the rest of the catalog to THQ Nordic, which put both games back out on newer hardware years after the studio that made them no longer existed.

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