Deadline Games

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

~ the last words ~

Half of what this studio made was in Danish and never left Denmark. CrossTown and Globetrotter, quiz work and edutainment built for a home market of five million people, sold into a country with its own shelf and its own language. That is the part of Deadline Games nobody outside Scandinavia has seen, and it is what paid for the first decade.

The company was founded in Copenhagen in 1996. In March 2001 Chris Mottes and Simon Jon Andreasen bought it from its owners and Mottes took the chief executive seat. The direction changed with them. Domestic edutainment does not scale. Consoles do, if you can get a publisher to look at you, and for a few years Deadline could.

At its largest it was about eighty people. That is a real studio in Denmark and a rounding error next to the publishers it needed, which is the arithmetic that runs every mid-size developer of that era. You take an advance and you deliver. Then you have eighteen months of runway and one shot at signing the next thing before the runway ends.

Nobody in Turkey bought a game because a Copenhagen company made it, and I doubt many people in Denmark did either. Total Overdose reached Turkish PCs in 2005 the way everything reached them then, as a disc with a publisher's mark on the box and no trace of who actually built it. The studio name was on the splash screen for four seconds and that was the whole relationship.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico came out in September 2005, published by SCi, running on PC and on both of the big consoles. You played Ramiro Cruz through a cartoon northern Mexico, shooting in slow motion off walls and stacking a combo meter that rewarded you for never touching the ground. Metacritic landed it at 71 and 72 depending on the platform, which is the exact score band where a game sells enough to justify a sequel and not enough to guarantee one.

Chili Con Carnage followed on PSP in 2007, the same world cut down to arcade rounds and a scoreboard. It was the correct move for a studio that had built one good thing and needed to sell it twice. It was not enough to change the position Deadline was in, which was waiting for somebody else to say yes.

~ what really happened ~

The last job was work for hire on a film. Warner Bros. put out two downloadable Watchmen games around the 2009 movie, and Deadline built them. Part one arrived in March 2009 next to the theatrical release. Reviews called the lighting better than the game, which is the standard verdict on a tie-in built to a release date somebody else chose.

On 29 May 2009 the board said it could no longer meet its financial obligations and filed for bankruptcy. The reporting at the time pointed at the same thing the studio had been saying for months: it could not find a publisher for Faith and a.45, the co-op shooter it had been shopping. Thirteen years, and the end came ten weeks after shipping a game.

~ what got buried with it ~

Total Overdose 2: Tequila Gunrise died in the filing. So did a pitch called Killing Pablo Escobar, which tells you what the studio thought its Mexico game had been about. Faith and a.45 had a public trailer and a following before it had a publisher, and it never got one. The catalog of a dead studio is always half things you can play and half things you can only read about.

Part two of the Watchmen game came out in July 2009, after the bankruptcy. Deadline had finished it before the money ran out and Warner shipped it on schedule into a market where the developer no longer existed. There is no sadder credit roll than one for a company that cannot be reached.

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