Eidos Hungary

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

~ the eulogy ~

The studio opened in March 2002 under the name Mithis Entertainment, built out of people who had just watched Philos Laboratories fold. Philos had made Theocracy, a strategy game about Aztec priest-kings that got respectable reviews and did not save the company, and when it went the staff did what Hungarian developers of that decade usually did, which was start again two streets over with the same desks and less money.

Their first release was Nexus: The Jupiter Incident in 2004, and it is the reason anyone remembers them. It was a capital-ship tactics game with no base building and no resource gathering, which in 2004 meant it fit nowhere on a shelf organized by Command & Conquer. The reviews were warm and the sales were not. It then spent fifteen years being rediscovered on GOG by people who wanted to know why nobody else had tried this. Creature Conflict: The Clan Wars followed in 2005 and nobody rediscovered that one.

Eidos Interactive bought Mithis in 2006 and renamed it Eidos Hungary, which solved the money problem and introduced a different one. In July 2006 the Sunday Times reported that Hungarian authorities were looking into intellectual property theft complaints brought by former Mithis people and by a stakeholder called MGE Software. SCi Entertainment, Eidos's parent at the time, denied everything and said the article had confused two different games. The investigation left no public conclusion and the studio kept working.

What it worked on was Battlestations. Midway shipped in January 2007 and Pacific in May 2009, two games that mixed naval strategy with letting you fly the individual planes, a combination that had an audience without ever having a large one. Square Enix bought Eidos in April 2009, a month before Pacific came out. By October the studio was closed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the budapest years ~

Hungary had a real games industry in the 2000s, and you cannot read it off the shelf, because the names on the boxes belonged to publishers in London and Hamburg. Mithis had two near neighbors in exactly the same business, StormRegion and Black Hole Entertainment, and all of them died within four years of each other. The usual cause was a parent company somewhere else deciding the category was finished.

The box for Battlestations: Pacific carries the Eidos logo and the Square Enix one, and nothing on it tells a buyer that the game was built in Budapest. That is the ordinary bargain a contract studio signs, and it explains why the closure produced no reaction anywhere. You cannot mourn a credit you never read.

~ the six month silence ~

Square Enix Europe made the decision in October 2009 and said nothing. The confirmation came on 19 April 2010, in an interview Phil Rogers gave to Develop about the restructuring he had been running since taking over the European business. Asked about Eidos Hungary, he said the company had decided not to move forward with the Battlestations IP or the studio attached to it, and added that being first or best in the real-time strategy genre was going to be really challenging.

Six months is a long time for a closure to stay quiet, and it is only possible when a studio has no public face of its own. There was no community manager with a forum account and no fanbase watching the office. Pacific's servers kept running for a long time after the people who built them had cleared their desks.

~ what got buried with it ~

Battlestations ended there as a series, with two games and no third. The naval-and-air hybrid it was built on has not really been attempted since at that scale, and the closest anyone has come is a mod scene running on other people's engines.

Nexus kept a longer tail than the studio did. Another Hungarian outfit, Most Wanted Entertainment, ran a Kickstarter for Nexus 2: The Gods Awaken in the autumn of 2012, asking for $650,000. It drew 3,858 backers and about $161,000, which is a lot of people and not enough money, and the sequel was never made. The original is still on sale.

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