Mucky Foot Productions

~ the obit ~

Mucky Foot was set up in Guildford in January 1997 by Mike Diskett and Fin McGechie, with Guy Simmons as the third name on the paperwork. All of them had just come out of Bullfrog, which was in the same town and in the middle of losing its people. Gary Carr, another Bullfrog veteran, joined as the fourth director shortly after. Where the rest of that diaspora landed is written up in the Bullfrog grave and does not need repeating here.

Eidos signed a worldwide publishing deal in October 1997 and used the announcement to unveil the first game. Urban Chaos shipped in 1999 on Windows and PlayStation, with a Dreamcast version behind it, and it put a rookie cop named D'arci Stern at the center of a third-person action game at a point when very few of those were led by a Black woman. It sold in decent numbers without becoming anything.

Startopia followed in June 2001 and is the reason anybody still says the studio's name. A space station cut into three decks, run by a player who had to keep passengers fed and entertained while a sarcastic droid commented on the results, it was the Theme Hospital design language pointed at science fiction. Critics liked it a great deal. The shelves did not move.

Blade II came in 2002, a licensed film tie-in for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, and it was the last thing the studio finished. Business and finances both fell away over the following year. The doors closed over a weekend and the news went out on Monday 3 November 2003.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three games in six years ~

That is the whole ledger, and it is the thing that killed the company. Six years of payroll in Surrey against three retail releases, none of which broke out, leaves no cushion for a fourth pitch that takes eighteen months to sell. Startopia in particular was the wrong shape for where PC gaming was heading and the wrong shape for where I was: a single-player management sim in the years when the Turkish internet cafes ran whatever you could play against the person two seats over, which meant Counter-Strike and not much else. The copies circulated at home. The conversation did not.

~ the ones that never shipped ~

Six projects were in development when the studio shut, all of them part-finished. Bulletproof Monk and The Punisher were the two furthest along, both licensed action games of the kind that kept British studios alive in that era. A second Urban Chaos was also on the list. The name resurfaced in 2006 as Urban Chaos: Riot Response, built for Eidos by a new London studio called Rocksteady, which three years later made Batman: Arkham Asylum.

This is the ordinary arithmetic of a work-for-hire studio in Guildford at the start of the 2000s. The publisher funds the project, the project takes two years, and if the last one underperformed there is no leverage in the room when you ask for the next. Eidos itself was in poor shape by 2003 and cutting outside commitments.

~ mucky feet ~

Gary Carr went to Lionhead after the closure and met Mark Webley there, and the two of them had both worked on the original Theme Hospital. In July 2016 they founded Two Point Studios with Ben Hymers and shipped Two Point Hospital in 2018, which is the successor game people had been asking for since 1997. Mike Diskett spent the intervening years elsewhere and eventually crowdfunded Satellite Reign, a Syndicate successor, on the same instinct. In Two Point Hospital there is a diagnosable condition called Mucky Feet.

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