Gray Matter Interactive

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

~ the last words ~

Xatrix Entertainment opened in Los Angeles in March 1993, started by Drew Markham and his business partner Barry Dempsey. The first two releases were Cyberia in 1994 and Cyberia 2: Resurrection the year after. What the studio became known for arrived in 1997 with Redneck Rampage, a shooter where the enemies were mutant hillbillies and the soundtrack was licensed psychobilly. Two more Redneck titles followed in 1998, and in the same year Xatrix built The Reckoning, an official mission pack for Quake II.

Kingpin: Life of Crime came in 1999, the studio at its most deliberately unpleasant. It was a gangster shooter with dismemberment and a script that swore constantly, put out into exactly the stretch of years when American retailers had become nervous about that. It was also the last thing to carry the Xatrix name.

Later in 1999 some of the original partners wanted out, and the exit was handled by rebuilding the company rather than selling it. Xatrix was transferred into a new corporation with Markham as creative director, and on 17 June 1999, with Activision's assistance, Gray Matter Studios was established and took on most of the former employees. Activision held 40 percent of the new company from the start.

~ the record ~

~ from redneck rampage to the castle ~

Return to Castle Wolfenstein shipped in 2001 and is the reason anyone outside the industry has heard of this studio. Gray Matter built the single-player campaign, the one with the castle and the occult research division in it. The multiplayer component came from a separate company, Nerve Software. The game did well enough that Activision exercised its option in January 2002 and bought the remaining 60 percent, with Markham signing a long-term contract to keep running the place.

Counter-Strike ran on every machine in the Turkish internet cafes I knew between 2002 and 2005, and the Wolfenstein that turned up beside it was the multiplayer build, which came from Nerve. Gray Matter's own work was the boxed campaign. A campaign gets finished once and then shelved, so the hours logged against the Wolfenstein name mostly went into the half this studio did not build.

~ eighteen people ~

The staff list ran to eighteen or twenty in 2001, the year of Wolfenstein, which is small for a studio shipping a flagship shooter on behalf of a publisher that size. After the buyout the work bent toward Activision's own calendar. A project called Trinity: The Shatter Effect was announced and then canceled in late 2003, and the last credited release was Call of Duty: United Offensive in 2004, an expansion pack rather than a game with its own name on the spine.

~ the treyarch years ~

In 2005, partway through development of Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, Activision merged Gray Matter into Treyarch. The team carried on inside Treyarch and worked on Call of Duty 3. Markham and several others left for other companies. The brand was never brought back. Wikipedia's Activision navbox still lists Gray Matter, filed under former studios rather than current ones.

graymatterstudios.com still resolves. It answered a probe this week with 114 bytes of markup and not one word of text. Twelve years of a company, and what sits at its address now is a file you could read in one screen of a terminal.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

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