Johnny Two Shoes

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

~ the goodbye ~

It began in May 2007 as a portfolio site for one person. Joshua Scott-Slade put his Flash work online, HighSpeedChase went out that August, and over the following three years the output was relentless in the way only Flash output could be: Thermostorm, Comatose, Attak, a pirate series, four worlds of a game called Banana Dash, The Heist. Sarah Jones did graphics. The whole thing ran on a browser plugin and the economics of a sponsored game.

Flash games are the one thing on this page I was actually inside. At twenty three I had a home connection quick enough that a game loaded before I lost interest, so one of these was something you opened in a tab because somebody sent a link, played for four minutes, and never thought about again. That is not nostalgia for any particular title. It describes how an entire category of software got consumed, and explains why hardly any of the studios behind it are remembered by name.

Commissions did come in. Channel 4 took two in 2009, The Great Sperm Race and a tie-in to Inside Nature's Giants, and Warner Bros. commissioned a game called 221B that December. Then the studio moved where everyone moved. High Speed Chase 2 went to the iPhone in July 2009 and Plunderland followed on 22 July 2010, a hand-drawn pirate game that is the one release people still bring up.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the gazette ~

Johnny Two Shoes LLP was incorporated on 24 March 2009, two years after the studio started working, roughly the usual lag between doing the work and registering a company to hold it. Companies House has the rest of it in a form no press release would ever match.

The last accounts cover the year to 31 March 2014. An amended set was filed in July 2015, the final annual return went in on 28 April 2016, and after that the register says nothing for three years. The registrar posted a first notice of compulsory strike-off on 16 April 2019, repeated it on 16 July, and the Final Gazette of 1 October 2019 recorded the LLP as dissolved. The registered office by then was in Ipswich, not London.

There had been an earlier near miss. That same notice had appeared once before, on 19 July 2011, and the action was dropped eleven days afterwards, on 30 July, because somebody noticed in time and filed. In 2019 nobody noticed.

~ what killed it first ~

Nobody shut this studio down. It stopped, and then an administrative process finished the sentence five years afterwards. Adobe gave Flash its end-of-life notice in 2017 and the browsers pulled the plugin at the end of 2020, but for a studio whose revenue came from sponsored Flash games the ground had already gone years before either of those dates.

johnnytwoshoes.com does not answer. It timed out on both schemes when I checked, and an earlier probe got a Cloudflare error of the kind that means the proxy is still configured while the origin server is gone. A planned game called The Flying Machine was never released.

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