Roll7

2008 - 2024
dead europe
take-two announced a cost reduction program on 16 april 2024 and would not say what was in it. two weeks later bloomberg named the studios. roll7 had won a bafta, had been bought at the top of the market in 2021, and was wound down about thirty months later by a parent that spent the following summer insisting it had not shuttered anything. the website went dark that august.

~ the goodbye ~

Companies House registered Rollingmedia Limited in London on 30 April 2008, trading as Roll7. For four years it made educational games on contract, the way plenty of British studios paid rent back then, and in 2012 it started building things it owned. OlliOlli arrived on the PlayStation Vita in January 2014, a side-on skateboarding game with a trick system strict enough to feel like an instrument, and it won the BAFTA for best sports game in March 2015.

A decade of small, confident games came after it: OlliOlli2 in 2015, Not a Hero the same year, Laser League in 2018, OlliOlli World in 2022, Rollerdrome a few months after that. The studio went fully remote in May 2015, years before anyone had to, and by February 2023 it employed 55 people without a building.

In November 2021 Take-Two bought it through Private Division, the publisher's label for mid-sized independent work. That was the top of the market. Everyone was buying studios then, and the logic of the purchases rarely survived contact with the next two years of interest rates.

On 16 April 2024 Take-Two announced a cost reduction program, said it would cut roughly 5 percent of its workforce, around 600 people, before 2025 began, and declined to provide further details. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier filled in the detail on 1 May: Roll7 and Intercept Games were being closed.

~ the chronicle ~

Born30 April 2008 in London, incorporated as Rollingmedia Limited
Peak55 staff in February 2023, a BAFTA for OlliOlli in March 2015
Killedreported 1 May 2024, wound down during 2024
Lifespanabout 16 years
Made bySimon Bennett, Tom Hegarty and John Ribbins
Killed byTake-Two Interactive's 5 percent headcount reduction

~ the denial ~

The strange part comes next. On 16 May 2024, two weeks after the report, Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick told IGN in plain words that his company had not shuttered those studios. No correction followed, and no closure announcement followed either.

The Internet Archive is less equivocal. roll7.co.uk served a working site of roughly 15 kilobytes through 4 August 2024, redirected away by 1 September, and returned a 404 that November. Roll7's closure was confirmed in reporting only after Take-Two sold Private Division to Haveli Investments that November, a full quarter after the site stopped answering.

~ the shell that kept filing ~

Rollingmedia Limited, company number 06580350, is still registered at Companies House and its status is still Active. Its registered office is 7 Savoy Court in London, which is Take-Two's UK address rather than Roll7's. The company that made OlliOlli filed accounts for the year to 31 March 2025, amended them in March 2026, and lodged a confirmation statement with no updates on 29 April 2026.

~ from here ~

A Vita exclusive in 2014 took deliberate effort to find, and I was not making it. By then my hands were on work machines and the games I played were whatever ran on a laptop in Ankara between deadlines. Roll7 belongs to a specific British indie wave that had its own festivals and its own press, and most of what reached me about it arrived years late, which is also roughly how its closure went: everybody found out late, from somebody else.

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other gaming: Capcom Vancouver, QuizUp, Seisen Cerberus, Human Entertainment

also died in the 2020s: Politics.ie, QuizUp, holoearth

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