Danger Close Games

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

~ the goodbye ~

The only Medal of Honor I ever actually got near was Allied Assault, during the internet cafe years between 2002 and 2005, sitting on the same machines as Counter-Strike. Allied Assault was not made by this studio. That mismatch runs through everything here: it invented the series that other people got famous on, then spent a decade as the address the franchise came home to.

It began on 22 March 1995 as DreamWorks Interactive, a joint venture between DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft, with 30 million dollars from each side and about 75 employees across an office in Los Angeles and a smaller one near Redmond. Steven Spielberg did the negotiating with Microsoft personally. The early games did not land. By August 1997 the biggest seller in the catalog was Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland at 130,000 copies, which the Los Angeles Times called a modest success and which is not what 60 million dollars of founding capital is looking for.

Then came the two releases that decided everything. Trespasser, a Jurassic Park game in 1998, tried to build a real physics engine and gave the player separate control of their character's limbs. It sold 50,000 copies and took up permanent residence on worst-game lists. Spielberg was left wondering whether he wanted a games company at all. Eighteen months later, on 31 October 1999, the same building shipped Medal of Honor for PlayStation. DreamWorks sold the Los Angeles studio to Electronic Arts on 24 February 2000, Medal of Honor rights included, for an amount analysts put near ten million dollars.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the names ~

Under EA it became EA Los Angeles, and for a decade it was a general-purpose studio rather than a franchise. In August 2003 it moved out of Bel Air into the Playa Vista campus and absorbed EA Pacific. People arrived from the recently closed Westwood Studios, and Command & Conquer arrived with them. The Redmond half had already gone the other way, folded into Microsoft's own games division; what remained of it became Turn 10.

In July 2010 EA renamed it Danger Close Games, after a radio call meaning the artillery is landing near your own position. The rename came with a narrowing. From that point the studio made Medal of Honor and nothing else.

~ the decline ~

The 2010 Medal of Honor moved the series out of the Second World War and into Afghanistan, which was the correct commercial read and also put it directly alongside Call of Duty, a series that existed because of what this studio had done in 1999. It shipped on 12 October 2010. Medal of Honor: Warfighter followed on 23 October 2012 and was received badly enough that EA stopped defending it.

On the earnings call of 30 January 2013, Peter Moore said the company was taking Medal of Honor out of the rotation, citing poor critical and commercial reception. Frank Gibeau said plainly that they had missed and that EA took responsibility. Nobody on that call mentioned the studio, which by then had been allowed to make one thing and had just lost permission to make it.

~ what replaced it ~

EA confirmed it at E3 that June, where Patrick Söderlund said that Danger Close as it was did not exist anymore. Staff scattered into other EA studios or out of Los Angeles entirely. A core of senior people became the foundation of DICE LA, formed in May 2013 as a satellite of the Battlefield studio, later renamed Ripple Effect. The campus in Playa Vista kept making war games without interruption; only the sign changed.

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