Park Place Productions

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

~ the obit ~

Michael Knox and Troy Lyndon started Park Place Productions in Carlsbad, California in 1989, and a press release they put out in July 1993 describes the beginning as a two-man operation with $3,000 in it. Four years later the same release claims more than thirty shipped titles. Knox's obituary would later put the number above seventy, which gives you a sense of how carefully anybody was counting.

Electronic Arts came to them in early 1990 for a Sega Genesis version of John Madden Football, and that contract is the reason the studio's name survives at all. Across those four years Park Place ran sports licenses for most of the industry at once: ABC Monday Night Football for Data East, Muhammad Ali Heavyweight Boxing for Virgin, Jeopardy! Sports Edition for GameTek, two ESPN titles for Sony Imagesoft. GamePro, in August 1993, introduced them simply as the creator of the original John Madden Football.

Madden is the piece of this I can reach least. American football never arrived in Turkey in any form I met, not on a channel I watched and not in a cartridge in any shop I walked into, and its grammar of downs and yardage is something that has been explained to me more than once without ever quite landing. A studio can be famous for a game that is, where you happen to live, not a game anybody plays.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the contract shop ~

The model was straightforward and it was also the weakness. Park Place did not own the licenses or the publishing; it sold capacity, measured in programmers, against milestones set by somebody else. That works while every milestone is signed off. Park Place carried no catalog of its own to fall back on when they were not.

~ the month the checks stopped ~

Publishers began holding payment back over missed milestones during 1993. One client said to be worth around a third of the studio's work pulled out, others followed, and by December there was nothing to pay a workforce with. Lyndon had already left, about two months before the end. The San Diego Union-Tribune covered the collapse as 1994 opened, under two headlines that say everything: "Software firm's collapse is fast, harsh" on the 1st, and "Park Place Isn't Bankrupt, but Payroll's Empty" on the 4th.

That second headline is the correction worth keeping. This was not a bankruptcy, and no filing has ever surfaced in any record reachable from here. Wikipedia's infobox says the fate was bankruptcy and gives the year as 1994, and both of those are uncited. The figure of a hundred and thirty developers working on forty-five games for fourteen publishers comes from a private email interview conducted in 2011, which means it cannot be checked against anything.

~ sorrento valley ~

Sony Imagesoft opened a development studio in Sorrento Valley, twenty minutes up the coast, and around thirty Park Place staff were inside it before December was over. That team became Sony Interactive Studios America in 1995 and 989 Studios after that, and the line runs on from there into Sony's San Diego Studio, which still makes MLB The Show.

What was left of Park Place tried to rebuild smaller and did not. Acclaim moved NFL Quarterback Club and Lennox Lewis Boxing to other developers. A spin-off called Spirit of Discovery was separated out in 1994. Michael Knox died in Kaneohe, Hawaii on 15 September 2009, aged 48.

~ three hundred and ninety million ~

The studio sued Sony. Electronic Gaming Monthly reported the action in its March 1997 issue, a full three years after the payroll failed: a claim for over $390 million, alleging that hardware and source code had been taken in December 1993, and that Sony had previously tried to buy the developer outright. That is the last trace of the company I can find in print. The domain is a parking lander now, and the games are all still in circulation under other people's names.

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