Budcat Creations

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

~ the obit ~

Jason Andersen and Jonah Stich met online over a shared interest in the Apple IIGS, on a service that came before AOL, and incorporated Budcat Creations in Iowa City on 1 September 2000. Isaac Burns, who had gone to high school with Andersen in that same town, joined as a partner a few months into the first year. Iowa City is a university town of well under a hundred thousand people with nothing resembling a games industry around it, so the studio had to be good at something a publisher in California actually needed done.

What it was good at was the other version. Through the first half of the decade Budcat shipped Madden NFL on the original PlayStation and the Game Boy Advance while the lead teams worked on newer hardware, and it did the same job for NASCAR Thunder and Total Club Manager. In 2005 it built the PlayStation 2 version of Psychonauts for Majesco, which is the credit most people would recognize if they recognized any of them at all. The studio moved into larger offices in Iowa City that year.

Activision Blizzard bought it on 10 November 2008 and pointed it at Guitar Hero. That franchise shipped with a plastic guitar in the box and lived on console retail, a market Turkey barely had: games here ran on PCs for the whole of that decade. The specific thing Budcat did, the PlayStation 2 build for households that had not upgraded, was hidden from me twice over, once because the consoles were rare and once because nobody puts the porting studio on the poster.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the port house ~

Budcat handled Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on Wii and PlayStation 2 in 2007, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith on both machines the year after, and then the PS2 builds of World Tour, Metallica, Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero as the series ran itself into the ground. The PlayStation 2 was nine years old by the end of that run and still selling in enormous numbers wherever the newer machines cost too much. These were not throwaway versions. They were the only version a large part of the audience was ever going to play.

The logo was a cat's head drawn out of a game controller, red and black, with a registered trademark symbol tucked beside the wordmark. The copy Wikipedia keeps carries a Photoshop timestamp of 23 June 2009 in its metadata, the nearest thing to the studio's own hand that survives in public.

~ the morning of the sixteenth ~

On 16 November 2010 Activision confirmed that Budcat was closed and that it was cutting quality assurance jobs in California at the same time, giving a combined figure of approximately 88 positions, about one percent of its global workforce. MCV put around seventy of those at Budcat. Former staff said they got no warning at all: the first sign was security standing in the building, and then they were told they no longer worked there. That same week the publisher put every employee of Bizarre Creations in England on ninety days' notice and went looking for a buyer.

~ what the credits say ~

Top Shot Arcade came out on the Wii in 2011, after the studio that made it had stopped existing. The copyright line on that disc belongs to a company that had already been wound down when it reached shelves.

budcat.com answers today with a generic ecommerce landing page and a toll-free number, nothing of the studio on it. What is left is a credits list: the twenty-six titles Wikipedia records, nearly all of them somebody else's game running on somebody else's hardware.

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