Rage Software

» see rage.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Rage died in January 2003. That was the middle of my cafe years in Turkey, and nothing Rage published was ever installed on one of those machines. Its business by the end was licensed boxes: Beckham's name on a football game, MGM's Rocky on a boxing one. I knew both of those names as a teenager and never once saw the name of the company paying for them.

It started as a developer, and a good one. In early 1992 part of Special FX Software, the Liverpool outfit that had spun out of Ocean's orbit, broke away to go independent, and what came out of that split was Rage, run by Paul Finnegan with studios in Liverpool and Newcastle. The first game was Striker, a football title that had sold 700,000 copies by 1995, and that was the credit the company spent for the next decade. Bristol Coin Equipment bought Rage in 1994 along with Software Creations and took the Rage name for itself in 1996. Software Creations was sold on to Sweeplink the following year. Its own site in April 2000 still described the business as "Development and Publishing of Video Games" and listed Incoming, Dead Ball Zone, Darklight Conflict and Striker; the keywords line on that page includes 3dfx, the card the PC builds were aimed at.

In 1997 Rage made the decision that killed it, although for another five years the decision looked like ambition: it would publish its own games instead of handing them to Ocean or Infogrames or anybody else. Publishing means paying for development and shelf space up front and recovering it later, on titles that have to ship when the licensor says they ship. A developer with a bad year loses a project; a publisher with a bad year loses money it has already spent. From 1997 Rage was its own publisher.

~ what it bought in 2000 ~

The expansion was extraordinary for a company this size. October 1999: Digital Image Design, bought from Infogrames UK and renamed Rage Warrington. January 2000: a stake in a technology holding company called Internet Indirect, plus Wayward Design in Bristol. February 2000: two new studios in Scotland with David Jones, who had created Grand Theft Auto, brought in to run them, plus RGB Tree, who had done the PlayStation port of GTA2, plus a fifth of Denki in Dundee and the rights to three Game Boy titles. There was an online division, Rage On-Line, announced to sell downloadable content and games direct. By Wikipedia's account the run of deals made Rage the fourth largest video game publisher in Europe by revenue, with Infogrames at the head of that list.

Then came the licenses. Nokia in February 2001 for phone games. Manchester United in March, a four-year deal for David Beckham's name. MGM in April for Rocky. Andy McNab in December, signed as creative and technical director on military titles, telling the press he had been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the studio's work. In June 2001, in between the Beckham deal and the Rocky deal, the company looked at its own bank account and found 500,000 pounds in it, then took a loan on terms that would have handed GEM Global Yield Fund 76 percent of its shares once the money was repaid. At that point it employed 260 people across four studios, in Newcastle, Bristol, Warrington and Birmingham.

The Beckham game is the one that broke it. A title carrying his name missed its 2001 shelf date and sold under forecast when it finally arrived. In March 2002 Rage admitted further losses on the publishing division and sold the Dundee studio to David Jones, who turned it into Realtime Worlds. That summer it raised 14.5 million pounds to finish the Lamborghini racer and a Rocky sequel. The Lamborghini game was lined up as an Xbox Live launch title.

~ 15 january 2003 ~

On Monday 13 January 2003 trading in Rage shares was suspended, and the company announced that its bankers had reviewed the position and discontinued its facilities. The facility was a four million pound overdraft and the bank was the Bank of Scotland. Reports from that week put the fall in the share price at 67 percent on the same day the suspension came.

Two days later it was over. The London Gazette of 24 January 2003 carries two notices, both filed under code 2421, appointment of administrative receivers: RAGE PLC, registration 1256550, previous name Rage Software Plc, and RAGE GAMES LIMITED, registration 02685663, previous name Rage Software Limited. Both record the same date of appointment, 15 January 2003, the same appointing party, The Bank of Scotland, and the same two joint administrative receivers, R H Kelly and K Hinds, of Cloth Hall Court in Leeds. The trading company's number lines up with the studio's own founding in 1992. The plc's number is far lower, so that registration is much the older of the two, left over from the coin-machine business that bought Rage and then took its name.

~ seventeen people ~

The receivers tried for a week to sell the company as a going concern and gave up on the evening of Wednesday 22 January. The reason they gave is the most specific thing anybody said about Rage's collapse. "We were faced with increasing complications posed by the number of licence holders and owners of intellectual property contained within the games," Hunter Kelly told Accountancy Age, "which made it illegal to hand over or give access to the information to interested parties." With no income to pay wages, the majority of the staff went that week, and seventeen were kept on to help sell the pieces. Rage spent four years assembling a publisher out of other people's names, and the names were the thing that made it unsellable.

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