Pandemic Studios

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

~ the obituary ~

star wars battlefront 2 was at internet cafes in ankara around 2005-2006, usually on a lan-only configuration alongside counter-strike 1.6 and warcraft 3. you would pick the empire side because the stormtroopers were the default and join a 16-player conquest game on hoth. the loading screen said pandemic studios in small letters under the lucasarts logo. that was the only place i ever saw the name. the studio that made the actual game was invisible to me, which is the normal experience of a console-tier publisher's branding model.

pandemic studios was founded in 1998 in westwood, los angeles, by andrew goldman and josh resnick. both had been at activision. the early titles were army-focused real-time and third-person work: battlezone 2 (1999, the original was an atari arcade revival), dark reign 2 (2000), and the army men: rts (2002). full spectrum warrior in 2004 was a department of defense training tool that pandemic adapted into a commercial release for thq.

the studio's commercial run started with star wars battlefront in september 2004 and battlefront 2 in november 2005. lucasarts published, pandemic developed. mercenaries: playground of destruction in 2005 was the open-world action game that paired with the battlefront cadence. destroy all humans in the same year was the b-side b-movie satire title. each of these moved more than a million units. by 2006 pandemic was one of the larger non-first-party studios in los angeles, with around 250 staff between westwood and a brisbane australia office.

i was not paying attention to the corporate side. in november 2005, elevation partners (the bono-affiliated private equity firm) packaged pandemic with bioware into vg holding corp. electronic arts bought vg holding in january 2008 for around eight hundred sixty million dollars. pandemic was an ea studio for less than two years. the brisbane office closed in february 2009. the saboteur shipped on december 8 2009 as the final pandemic title. ea announced the westwood office closure on november 17 2009, three weeks before the game came out. two hundred twenty-eight people were laid off. thirty-five transferred to ea los angeles. the saboteur turned out to be a decent game that nobody knew was the last thing the studio would ship.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

pandemic was a contractor-style studio that took licensed ip and built large open-world or large-multiplayer-arena games around it. battlefront proved out the second part. you could ship a star wars game with sixteen-player multiplayer on the ps2 and xbox if you simplified the geometry and let the lighting carry the visual identity. battlefront 2 added the space-combat layer and the campaign hero units. it was the game that most people who played star wars games in the mid-aughts actually remember.

the mercenaries series was the in-house ip. you played a private military contractor in north korea, dropping into a sandbox where the four factions had their own ai goals and you could play any of them off against each other. it had real systems-driven gameplay underneath the b-movie tone. battlefield bad company and just cause 2 and grand theft auto 4 were the more famous mid-aughts open-world titles. mercenaries was the third or fourth one most people remember once you walk them through the catalog.

~ the day it died ~

the ea-pandemic relationship was reportedly difficult from january 2008 onward. mercenaries 2 had shipped in august 2008 with mixed reception and lower-than-expected sales. the saboteur was supposed to be the comeback title. ea was already cutting headcount across its studios through 2009 (black box in burnaby, mythic in fairfax, eight other cuts in the same year). the november 17 announcement gave the saboteur team three weeks to finish polish before the layoffs were processed.

former pandemic staff scattered through the los angeles game industry: 343 industries took several engineers for halo work. infinity ward, treyarch, and respawn entertainment each took a chunk. some of the leads founded torn banner studios. the westwood office that built battlefront 2 was emptied out and the brand was retired.

~ the funny part ~

star wars battlefront 2 (2005) is still the version most people mean when they say star wars battlefront. ea released its own battlefront in 2015 and battlefront ii in 2017, both built by dice in sweden. the 2017 one launched with a loot-box monetization scheme that caused such a fan revolt that disney intervened publicly. ea reverted the loot boxes within forty-eight hours. the 2005 pandemic version meanwhile got a steam re-release in 2017 with online multiplayer brought back, and several active modding communities have kept it running. honestly it has outlived the studio that made it by sixteen years and counting.

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