Relentless Software

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

~ the obit ~

Andrew Eades told GamesIndustry.biz on 5 August 2016 that every one of his employees was being made redundant, that day. Relentless Software was a few months short of thirteen years old and had an unannounced PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game in development. The closure came with no public explanation attached, then or later.

For most of its life Relentless was the studio that made Sony's Buzz! games. It built the bulk of the series between 2005 and 2010, a quiz franchise that sold more than ten million units across a dozen-odd titles, from a Brighton office of thirty to fifty people. David Amor and Andrew Eades had founded it in 2003.

The years after Buzz! were a run of attempts to be something other than Sony's quiz studio. Blue Toad Murder Files arrived in 2009 as its first self-published work, on PC and PlayStation Network. Quiz Climber Rivals went to the iPhone in 2011, two small games went into Microsoft's Kinect Fun Labs, and Kinect Nat Geo TV shipped in 2012, after which Amor left. The last release was Murder Files: The Enigma Express in 2014, on iOS and Android and Chrome and the Kindle Fire, four platforms at once.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ thirty-six hours ~

Amor and Eades met at the Brighton office of Computer Artworks, which was building a DJ simulation game for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe when it went into receivership in October 2003. The two of them went to SCEE and offered to set up a company and finish the project themselves. To their own reported surprise, SCEE agreed. Relentless existed thirty-six hours after that meeting.

That origin set the shape of everything after. The DJ project turned into the Buzz! work, and for the next seven years Relentless was functionally a Sony second-party studio without the badge or the balance sheet protection that comes with one. It is a good way to start a company and a hard way to stay one.

~ four handsets in the box ~

The thing that made Buzz! sell was in the box rather than on the disc. Each copy shipped with four wired handsets, a big button on top of each, which turned the purchase from a game into a piece of furniture for the living room. Sony kept the brand after the series wound down around 2010, and the handsets are the part people still mention first.

~ what was already booked ~

Earlier in 2016 Relentless had announced a second studio in Pontypridd, Wales, part funded by the Welsh government, expected to create about seventy jobs with Hasbro work attached to it. That is what made the August announcement land oddly in the trade press: a company that had just committed to more than doubling in size closed instead. Former chief technical officer Bruce Heather went on to run a new Brighton studio for Lockwood Publishing.

Buzz! was a living room product for a household with a console under a shared television and four people willing to sit down in front of it at the same time. My gaming through that decade was a PC in my own room, and the console party-game aisle never had much presence where I was buying things. PlayStation hardware was certainly in Turkey, often modified, but a boxed bundle with four controllers inside it is a retail shape that needs a particular kind of high street to work.

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