Guerilla Tea

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

~ the obituary ~

Guerilla Tea Games Limited was dissolved on 14 August 2018 by compulsory strike-off, which is the ending a company gets when it stops filing and nobody at Companies House can find a reason not to delete it. There was no closure announcement and no sale. The last document the company ever filed was a set of micro-company accounts made up to 31 March 2017, lodged on 28 March 2018, and that filing bought it four and a half more months.

The studio had begun in Dundee on 28 June 2011 as Guerilla Tea LLP, registered to 14 Constitution Crescent, founded by four graduates of the Professional Masters in Video Game Development at Abertay University. Abertay is the reason Dundee has a games industry at all, and the pipeline from that course into small local studios was the city's whole model. A limited company followed on 25 February 2013 at the same address, and the partnership was wound up in May 2015 once the newer entity had taken over.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The debut was The Quest, a puzzle game built around the Rubik's Cube, released on iOS and Android and re-released for mobile in March 2014. Not long after it shipped, Guerilla Tea won TIGA's £100,000 competition, which for a studio of four people barely out of a masters course is a transformative amount of money.

Then came the one that mattered. Play to Cure: Genes in Space was built with Cancer Research UK and released in February 2014, and the premise was genuinely new: while you flew a ship through an asteroid field collecting a fictional substance, you were actually classifying real genetic microarray data, and the route you plotted through the debris was a human judgment about where the signal sat. Thousands of players doing this in parallel produced analysis that would otherwise have taken researchers far longer. Within a month of release there had been 1.5 million classifications. It got onto The One Show.

The charity that commissioned it was British and so was its donor base, which is the limit of how far this one traveled. Genes in Space was downloaded as an act of participation in a national fundraising culture, and that culture does not export. The idea did, eventually, into a whole genre of citizen-science games built on the same trick.

~ five notices ~

The filing history reads like a heart monitor. A first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off went out on 26 June 2015, and was discontinued the next day. Another on 8 March 2016, discontinued on 12 March, two days after accounts arrived. Another on 31 May 2016, discontinued on 30 July. Another on 20 March 2018, discontinued on 31 March, three days after that final set of accounts was filed. Each time the registrar moved to delete the company, somebody noticed and stopped it.

The fifth notice went out on 29 May 2018 and nothing came back. This is not a studio that collapsed, because a collapse is an event with a date somebody announces. It is a studio that had already stopped, and the register took three more years to catch up with a fact the founders had presumably known since about 2015.

~ what got left on the shelf ~

Wikipedia still lists the company's products in the present tense, including Sandbox TD, described as being worked on alongside a number of smaller titles for mobile and web. That sentence has been sitting there since roughly 2014, which means the public record of Guerilla Tea stopped at the same moment the filings did. The teapot logo with a star in it, under the words THE RECREATION REVOLUTION, is about as 2011 as a Dundee startup could possibly look.

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