Elixir Studios

» see elixir-studios.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Elixir Studios was founded in London on 7 July 1998 by Demis Hassabis, who had been at Lionhead and was leaving it to make his own things. The way it got funded says what kind of company it meant to be. He turned down the venture capital available to him because the terms were wrong. Instead he took a stand at E3 in Atlanta that summer and pitched fifteen publishers in person, and Eidos Interactive signed a three-game agreement. The studio's stated rule was no licenses: everything it shipped would be its own.

The first game took more than five years. Republic: The Revolution came out in 2003 and tried to simulate a whole post-Soviet country called Novistrana, with thousands of individual citizens who held opinions you could work on, and a player character building a revolution out of influence rather than armies. It ran badly and it was hard to learn, and the reviews said so. What nobody disputed was that it had tried something.

Evil Genius followed in September 2004 and showed the studio's other register. You were a Bond villain with a volcano base, hiring minions and building a death ray in a cartoon 1960s. It was funny in a way Republic had made no attempt to be. It reviewed decently and sold moderately, and over the following years it acquired a following well out of proportion to how it had sold.

By then the studio had grown to around sixty people and had a third project running. It had been in development for two years when it was canceled, on the grounds of what the studio called perceived high risk. On 28 April 2005, Rob Fahey reported in GamesIndustry.biz that Elixir would close.

~ the case file ~

~ novistrana ~

Republic is the game that explains the company. The brief was a functioning society, modeled citizen by citizen, with an artificial-intelligence layer deciding how influence propagated through it. That is a research project with a release date attached, and it is the same instinct that eventually produced a company whose products are research. The 2003 reviews marking it down for performance were not wrong, but they were grading a simulation nobody had asked for against the strategy games people were buying.

I did not follow this studio while it existed. What holds up now is not either game but the closure statement, a company saying out loud that its reason for existing had stopped being fundable. That decade for me was a university in Turkey, where the same arithmetic decided which student projects got finished.

~ what hassabis took with him ~

Elixir closed with money in hand. The statement said the company had the resources to cover redundancy packages and wind itself down in an orderly way. Hassabis said in the release that the industry "no longer has room for small independent developers wanting to work on innovative and original ideas", and that this "was the sole purpose of setting up Elixir and something we could never compromise on". Rebellion Developments bought the intellectual property in March 2006, Evil Genius included.

He went back to academia and took a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience. DeepMind followed in 2010 and Google bought it in 2014. In 2018 he talked to Forbes about the dark hours at the games company, and he has credited Elixir with teaching him how to run a team doing work that might not come off.

elixir-studios.co.uk answers a bare 403 from a shared host today. Both games are still sold under other people's names, and the third one has no name at all, because it never got far enough to be given one publicly.

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