Brash Entertainment

~ the eulogy ~

Brash Entertainment stopped operating on 14 November 2008. Variety's post-mortem called it the video game industry's first Hollywood-style publisher in one paragraph and its first Hollywood-style flameout in the next.

It was put together in 2007 by Thomas Tull of Legendary Pictures, Bert Ellis, Nicholas Longano as president and chief operating officer, and Mitch Davis as chief executive and chairman. The address was on Sunset Boulevard. The pitch rested on two things that were both true. Movie licenses are a more consistently profitable corner of games than original work, and private equity was looking for somewhere to put money in a business growing at double digits. What Brash added to those was the idea that people from the film business could run a games publisher better than the games business was running it. A press release in June 2007 announced the company launching with a $400 million investment.

Three games came out of it. Alvin and the Chipmunks in 2007, then Jumper: Griffin's Story and Space Chimps in 2008. They went out across the PlayStation 2, the Wii, the DS and the Xbox 360. A fourth, Six Flags: Fun Park, was in hand when the company stopped. Everything else, and there was a lot of everything else, went back to the studios that had licensed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ $400 million, mostly debt ~

The number in the press release was not an investment in the sense a reader takes from the word. Variety's post-mortem, published 26 November 2008, says most of it was debt the company was never able to access, and that Brash burned through well over $100 million in its short existence. The headline figure was a credit facility plus a promise, and both halves of that arrangement depended on conditions holding.

They did not hold. Thomas Tull left the board, reportedly frustrated with the quality of what the company was shipping, and he had been the one who played the key role in raising the financing. With him gone and the credit markets freezing in the autumn of 2008, Brash's ability to draw on the debt portion of its $400 million rapidly dissipated, in Variety's wording. Most insiders quoted in that piece thought the company could have raised more money and kept going if its moment of need had arrived at any other time.

The people problem came first, though. Davis had never worked for a video game publisher. Longano had never held a role that senior. Variety reports that no other member of the board of directors had any video game industry experience either, and that Davis spent most of his time in New York while others ran the company day to day. Between March and August the senior vice president of business affairs, the president, the chief creative officer, the senior executive producer and a co-founder all left.

Running underneath all of it was a multiplayer online game about stock trading called Wall Street, a personal project of the chief executive that employees and executives disliked and that he kept alive regardless. It was still in development with private money when the company that had been distracted by it was gone.

~ 60,000 and 59,000 ~

To get its hands on A Night at the Museum 2, Brash agreed with Fox to produce games based on Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jumper and Space Chimps in less than a year. A game of any quality took about two. Alvin sold 360,000 units domestically, which counts as decent for the category. Jumper sold 60,000 and Space Chimps sold 59,000. All three lost money, and the reputational damage was worse than the losses: developers and studio executives told Variety they were reluctant to be associated with the company based on what it had put out. Jonathan Eubanks, who had been senior executive producer and left over the summer, put it plainly: "In the end, our games were not quality offerings and everyone in the company knew that to be the case before they went out."

One detail from the same article is the clearest picture of what went wrong. Brash projected Space Chimps sales on the assumption that the film would gross around $150 million, in line with Fox animated features like Ice Age and Horton Hears a Who. Nobody there had noticed that the film was not made by Fox Animation and that the studio was only distributing it. Space Chimps grossed $30 million. Meanwhile the company had canceled its distribution deal with Warner Bros by that summer and was building its own operation instead, which some sources called a saving and others called a waste of effort at the worst possible time.

~ ceasing operations as of tomorrow ~

Through the autumn the remaining executives tried to find a way out, raising new funds, then talking to Lionsgate and Haim Saban about an acquisition. None of it worked. Brash stopped paying its developers, which produced two lawsuits and reportedly more in preparation, and on 13 November 2008 Ben Fritz posted a short item to Variety's games blog: "Several sources have confirmed for me that Brash Entertainment is ceasing operations as of tomorrow." No source I can reach describes a bankruptcy filing. What they describe is a company that ran out of cash and stopped. The games in production went back to their licensors. Most of them did eventually come out, The Tale of Despereaux with Atari, Six Flags: Fun Park with Ubisoft, Saw with Konami, Prison Break with Deep Silver and Clash of the Titans with Bandai Namco, the last of those in 2010. Factor 5's California arm, which had been living on Brash contract work including a Superman game, let its staff go in May 2009.

A licensed game of this kind gets bought by an adult standing in a shop near a film poster, inside the few weeks either side of a release date, and that window is the whole of its commercial life. I have never once bought a game because a film was out. Brash needed that buyer to turn up in numbers its first three games never saw. The release date belonged to a film studio, and the product had half the time the work takes. Patrick Sweeney, the company's former general counsel, told Variety that it did not have to end this way. The three games Brash finished sold 479,000 copies between them, and every one of them lost money.

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