Lost Toys

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

~ the eulogy ~

Lost Toys Ltd was set up in Guildford in March 1999 by people who had all come through Bullfrog Productions, the studio down the road that made Populous and Syndicate before Electronic Arts absorbed it. Glenn Corpes was director and lead designer and Darran Thomas was director and head of art. Jeremy Longley took the managing director's chair. The registered office was Connaught House on Alexandra Terrace and the company number was 03727037.

The first game was Moho, an arena ball sport played by walking machines inside a bowl, released in 2000 and retitled Ball Breakers for North America. A small team builds something like that to prove it can handle physics and a camera. It found no audience under either name.

The second was Battle Engine Aquila, a mech shooter with a transforming walker over very large battlefields, published on Xbox and PlayStation 2 by Infogrames in January 2003. Corpes has since called it the best thing he ever worked on. The reviews were respectable and the sales were not, and the studio spent that spring taking whatever work it could find. In May, Geoff Crammond chose Lost Toys as his development partner for Stunt Car Racer Pro, a sequel to his own 1989 game.

A deal for a PC version of Battle Engine Aquila was signed in August 2003. On 2 October the studio closed and the staff were made redundant. Longley stayed on with a skeleton crew to finish the PC port, which is the part of a closure nobody writes about: somebody always has to stay behind and deliver the thing that was already paid for.

~ the dossier ~

~ the aquila problem ~

Battle Engine Aquila had a real idea in it. You flew a machine that converted between a walker and a gunship across battlefields big enough that the fighting continued whether you were present or not, with ground armies taking and losing territory on their own schedule. In 2003 that was expensive to build and almost impossible to sell, because the back of the box could not show you the one thing that made it different.

Turkey was never in the market for it in any case. The Xbox and the PlayStation 2 were specialty purchases here against a PC base that ran everything, and a console-only shooter from a two-game British studio had no route to a shelf in Ankara. The parent name is the one I knew. Populous and Theme Hospital were all over the PC world in the nineties, and nothing told you that the people who built them had walked out and started something of their own.

~ the receipt ~

The closure and the company's legal death are different dates, and only the second one is in a public register. On 19 May 2004 the Commissioners of Customs and Excise, through their Civil Recovery Unit in Liverpool, presented a petition to wind up Lost Toys Ltd. It was heard at the Leeds District Registry on 20 July 2004 as matter 845 of 2004, and the court made the winding-up order the same day.

The London Gazette printed the petition on 5 July and the order on 9 August. The registered office was still given as Connaught House in Guildford, the Official Receiver was the one in Croydon, and the petitioner's solicitor was DLA in Bradford. More than nine months had passed since the staff went home.

Corpes later founded Weirdwood and was still self-publishing his own work in 2017. The domain printed across the bottom of the Lost Toys logo, losttoys.com, now answers with a 114-byte stub whose only instruction is to forward you to a parking lander.

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