Human Head Studios

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

~ the eulogy ~

Six developers walked out of Raven Software in October 1997 and started Human Head in Madison, Wisconsin. Tim Gerritsen joined as co-owner the following June. Their first game was Rune in 2000, a Norse third-person melee game on the Unreal engine, and it did well enough that the studio survived the part where most new studios do not.

What they became was a contract shop with one famous credit. Human Head finished Prey in 2006, which is a sentence that undersells it: Prey had been in development at 3D Realms since 1995 and had been abandoned twice, and Human Head took the concept and shipped it. After that came a long list of other people's projects. Brink in 2011, Defiance in 2013, work on BioShock Infinite and Batman Arkham Origins that shows up in credits rather than on boxes, plus their own small things like Minimum and Survived By.

Rune II went on sale on 12 November 2019. On 13 November, Chris Rhinehart posted that the studio had to wind down the business and close its doors. Bethesda announced the same week that it had hired the entire team and stood up a new studio, Roundhouse, in the same city. Twenty-two years of one company, ended and re-staffed inside a few days.

~ the dossier ~

~ the credits problem ~

Studio graves are strange, because the studio was almost never the thing you knew. If you played Prey in 2006 the name on the packaging was 3D Realms and 2K Games. Human Head was in the credits and on a splash screen you skipped. That is the normal condition for a work-for-hire developer. The publisher's logo goes on the box and the developer's goes on a screen you press a key to skip.

This one is worth naming precisely because of that. The Prey engine work and twenty-two years of finishing other companies' games on schedule came out of one building in Madison, which closed with a two-sentence statement.

~ prey, and then prey again ~

Prey 2 was announced in 2011 and showed at E3 that year to a very good reception. Then it stopped. Human Head halted work in 2012 over a contract dispute, and the shape of that dispute is the part worth recording: the agreement barred the studio from developing anything else until Prey 2 was delivered, and Bethesda stopped funding Prey 2. So Human Head could not finish the game it was on and could not legally take another. It waited.

Bethesda confirmed the cancellation in October 2014 and said the game was not up to its quality standard. Arkane later made a game called Prey in 2017 that shares a title with the 2006 one and almost nothing else. Human Head spent those years on Defiance and The Quiet Man and contract work, and never got another shot at its own flagship.

~ what the lawsuit said ~

In December 2019, one month after the closure, Rune II publisher Ragnarok Game sued Human Head. The claim was that the studio had abandoned the game publicly on launch day and then refused to hand over source code and assets so anyone else could pick it up. In October 2020 the suit was amended to add ZeniMax and Bethesda, seeking no less than 100 million dollars.

The amended filing alleges that Human Head gave Bethesda keys to a confidential pre-release build, that Bethesda saw Rune II as a threat to the Elder Scrolls franchise, and that ZeniMax was the only prospective buyer that demanded secrecy and refused to allow further work on Rune II to continue. Whether any of that holds up is a court's problem. As an epitaph it is unusually specific about what a studio closing on a Wednesday can look like from the other side of the table.

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