Silicon Dreams Studio

~ the eulogy ~

Geoff Brown started Silicon Dreams in March 1994 as the in-house development team for U.S. Gold, a publisher he had also founded, and the whole arrangement sat under the CentreGold umbrella. In April 1996 Eidos Interactive bought CentreGold entire for 17.6 million pounds. Eidos wanted Core Design, which was already deep into Tomb Raider, and it wanted the distribution business. By December of that year Brown had bought back a 75 percent share of the Silicon Dreams label for at least 500,000 pounds and folded it into a newly incorporated company of the same name, owned by Geoff Brown Holdings, which later renamed itself Kaboom Studios.

The output was football and licensed toys. Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996 shipped on the 3DO, DOS, PlayStation and Saturn. World League Soccer '98 followed, then Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000 on the Dreamcast. The Nintendo 64 got Michael Owen's World League Soccer 2000, a title that tells you plainly whose name was selling the box. Lego accounted for most of the rest. Lego Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge and Island Xtreme Stunts were both built in Adderbury, for a brand with nothing to do with sport.

At 1:51 in the afternoon on 3 September 2003, gamesindustry.biz published a story headlined "Further woe for UK development as two more shut their doors" and admitted in its second sentence that neither report was confirmed. One of the two was Silicon Dreams. The other was Asylum Entertainment in North London, which had lost a Lego project and laid off everybody. Attention to Detail, the sister studio in the same group, had gone into liquidation the previous week. Silicon Dreams went the same way, and 55 employees were let go.

~ the dossier ~

~ fifty five desks in adderbury ~

Adderbury is a village in Oxfordshire, near Banbury. Fifty five jobs is a serious employer for a place that size and a rounding error in the industry's accounts. That gap is more or less the position the studio held the whole time it existed. Gavin Cheshire ran it as managing director. The games went out under other people's brands: Sega's logo on one box, Lego's on the next.

There is a reason a work-for-hire studio is hard to remember. Its name is on the credits screen and nowhere else. Michael Owen's name sold copies in Britain in 2000 and carried no weight whatsoever in Turkey, where the machines I used were internet cafe terminals running Counter-Strike rather than licensed football. Silicon Dreams was building for buyers I was not among, and it was not allowed to sign the work.

~ the kaboom collapse ~

The group did not outlast its studios by much. On the day Silicon Dreams went, the trade noted that the remaining Kaboom developer, Pivotal Games, looked safe: its new title The Great Escape had entered the UK chart at number eight that week, and Pivotal was the most independent of the three in both managerial and financial terms. gamesindustry.biz later ran a piece headlined "Kaboom goes into receivership; Pivotal for sale". No date reached me with that headline, so the group's own ending stays approximate in a way the studio's does not.

~ eleven came back ~

Eleven of the 55 announced a new studio in October 2003 and called it Gusto Games. Their first job was to finish Urban Freestyle Soccer, the game that had been canceled under them in September. It shipped that December, three months after the company that started it stopped existing.

The games are easier to find today than the company is. Licensed work usually ends up that way. Lego Island 2 still has an audience with no idea where it was built, and Michael Owen's World League Soccer 2000 is a dated object from a year when a footballer's name was worth putting in a title. Nine years of building under other people's brands is a career that ends without a signature.

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