Intelligent Games

~ the obituary ~

Matthew Stibbe started The Intelligent Games Co. in Oxford in 1988. The company moved to London in 1992 and incorporated under the shorter name a year later. What it did for the decade after that barely has a job title now: building other companies' games for them under other companies' brands, and getting almost none of the credit.

The catalog reads like a list of licenses rather than a body of work. Electronic Arts commissioned Imperium in 1990. PGA European Tour arrived in 1994, Maxis put out SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest in 1995, and Azrael's Tear followed in 1996. Then came Lego Loco in 1998, with Lego Stunt Rally and F1 Manager in 2000. Tweenies: Game Time followed in 2001, and 2002 FIFA World Cup shipped in the studio's final year.

The Westwood work is where the footprint is. A PC game of Waterworld in 1997 got the studio noticed, and Westwood Studios commissioned it to build the two expansion packs for Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Counterstrike and The Aftermath, both out that year. Westwood then asked for a remake of Dune II. That became Dune 2000 in 1998, and Emperor: Battle for Dune followed in 2001.

By 1999 the studio had 65 people, up from 25 in November 1995. Three years later it had none. Wikipedia puts the closure at December 2002 with the fate recorded as liquidation, and all of the assets were sold. The article rests on one source, a David Crookes feature in Retro Gamer issue 211 from September 2020.

~ the case file ~

~ the westwood offer ~

In 1999 Westwood Studios offered to acquire Intelligent Games, and the deal was not completed. Electronic Arts closed Westwood on 31 March 2003, three months after the London studio's own liquidation, so the version of this where the sale went through is not obviously a happier one. What the offer establishes is that the studio's biggest client thought it was worth owning, in the same year it reached its largest headcount.

Nothing in the catalog belonged to the studio. Dune 2000 is a Westwood product, and the Lego games belong to Lego. Fourteen years of that leaves a studio with skill and credits and no asset that keeps paying. When the commissions stopped there was nothing underneath to stand on.

~ the splash screen ~

Red Alert and its two add-ons were on every PC I sat at in Turkey around 1999 and 2000, on copied discs with no box. Dune 2000 came through the same channel. None of us knew the expansion discs and the Dune remake had been built by a different company than the base game. The splash screen that said so went past in two seconds and the name on it meant nothing to anyone in the room.

A contract studio lives like that by default. Seventeen titles over fourteen years are covered by one magazine feature and one short Wikipedia article, and the Wikipedia article carries a banner warning that it rests on a single source. The studio never had a domain of its own that outlived it: intelligentgames.com belonged to somebody else by 2001 and has never carried a word about the company.

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