Headfirst Productions

» see headfirstproductions.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Headfirst Productions was incorporated on 22 May 1998 in Sutton Coldfield, outside Birmingham. Mike Woodroffe had been making adventure games in the West Midlands since the eight-bit era, and his son Simon had grown up in the same business; between them they already had Adventure Soft and the Simon the Sorcerer series. Headfirst was the part of the operation that would build for consoles.

Two games came out of it. Simon the Sorcerer 3D arrived in April 2002, the series in polygons for the first time. The other one took everything else. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth went into development in 1999 and shipped on the Xbox on 24 October 2005, six years later, with a PlayStation 2 version cancelled along the way and a long list of features cut out of it.

What shipped was still unusual enough that people still talk about it. There was no interface on the screen at all, not even a crosshair. Injuries were specific: a broken leg wanted a splint and a cut wanted a bandage, and you applied them yourself. Your character's mind came apart when he looked at the wrong thing, and the camera came apart with it. The first stretch of the game hands you no weapon at all and makes you run through a hotel in Innsmouth with the town coming up the stairs behind you.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the money ~

Critics liked it. Buyers did not, in anything like the numbers six years of payroll needed. Afterward the studio and Bethesda Softworks fell out over finances, and roughly half the staff left. The ones who stayed kept working on the sequel, Call of Cthulhu: Destiny's End, and on porting the engine to the next generation of consoles, while the directors went looking for someone to sign it.

Nobody did. Five cancellations are listed against the studio's name. Three were Mythos games, among them Beyond the Mountains of Madness and the direct sequel, Destiny's End. The other two were adaptations, one of Deadlands and one of Battle of the Planets.

~ four years of liquidators ~

The administrator's appointment was filed at Companies House on 3 March 2006. The retail PC release of Dark Corners of the Earth followed in Europe on 24 March and in North America on 26 April, which means the last game it ever finished reached PC shops while the company itself was being wound up. Staff scattered to Codemasters, to Eurocom in Derby, to Sega Racing Studio.

Then came the slow part. The case moved from administration to creditors' voluntary liquidation on 13 February 2007. Liquidators filed their receipts and payments every six months for three years. The final meeting was returned on 11 March 2010 and the final Gazette notice went up on 11 June 2010, four years and four months after the studio stopped existing in any way that mattered. The domain answers with an authentication prompt today and nothing behind it.

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