Incognito Entertainment

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

~ the obituary ~

SingleTrac in Salt Lake City made Twisted Metal and Jet Moto for Sony in the middle nineties and was then sold off and wound down. In 1999 Scott Campbell started a new company in the same city with people out of it. It was Incognito Studios first, then Incog Inc. Entertainment, then Incognito Entertainment. Sony signed it almost immediately and bought it outright in August 2002, at which point there were fifty-one employees.

Twisted Metal: Black came out on 19 June 2001 and is the studio's best work by a distance. It took a series about clowns in ice cream trucks and moved it into an asylum, giving every driver a story told in short grainy cutscenes. The game scored 91 on Metacritic and had sold 950,000 copies in the United States by the middle of 2006. A multiplayer-only online version was given away free the year after release, and it was one of the first things anybody in the world played online on a PlayStation 2.

War of the Monsters and Downhill Domination followed in 2003, then Twisted Metal: Head-On on PSP in 2005. Warhawk arrived on the PlayStation 3 in August 2007 with no single-player campaign in it at all, which was a strange bet for a first-party console release at the time and mostly came off.

The studio was never formally shut in the way most studios are. In July 2007 Campbell and David Jaffe left with the majority of the staff and started Eat Sleep Play, which Sony then funded. Dylan Jobe took charge of what remained, kept Warhawk patched and populated for two more years, and left in March 2009 with several others to found LightBox Interactive in Austin. LightBox took the Warhawk work with it. Whatever was still called Incognito was dissolved that year.

~ the case file ~

~ twisted metal: black ~

Black is the one people still argue about. The first two Twisted Metal games were SingleTrac's and were cartoons. This one was shot in browns and grays, set in and around the Blackfield Asylum, and framed as a stack of case files, with Sweet Tooth recast as a patient. The tone sat much closer to a horror film than a vehicular combat game usually gets, and the driving underneath it was fast enough that the tone never got in the way.

It was an early PlayStation 2 game from a studio of about fifty people and it reviewed better than nearly anything Sony put out that year. Incognito never beat it, and neither has the series since.

~ the first walkout ~

David Jaffe had directed the original Twisted Metal at SingleTrac and produced Incognito's games from the Sony side of the table. In July 2007, weeks before Warhawk shipped, he and Campbell left with most of the staff to set up Eat Sleep Play, and Sony funded the new company and licensed Twisted Metal to it. From Sony's seat this was a perfectly reasonable arrangement, since the people it wanted were still making the games it wanted under a different letterhead.

What it left behind was a first-party studio with a name, a live game and not many people in it. Jobe ran that arrangement for twenty months.

~ what warhawk was ~

Warhawk in 2007 shipped without a campaign. What you got for your money was thirty-two-player servers, ground vehicles and aircraft you could fly into and out of a ground battle without a loading screen between the two. Sony sold it as a download and also on a disc bundled with a bluetooth headset, because the game assumed you would be talking to people.

The servers moved with Jobe to LightBox, which shipped Starhawk in 2012 and then stopped shipping. Sony switched Warhawk off on 31 January 2019 along with the rest of the PlayStation 3 online infrastructure it was retiring, twelve years after release and ten after the studio that built it stopped existing. incognitoentertainment.com is a domain-for-sale page now.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »