SingleTrac

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

~ the goodbye ~

SingleTrac was incorporated in March 1994 by Michael Ryder and Todd Kelly. Michael Bartholomew was the third founder, and all of them came out of Evans and Sutherland, the Salt Lake City firm that built real-time 3D for flight simulators, which is to say for people who were not playing. By the late summer they had a deal with Sony Imagesoft for two PlayStation games, funded by Sony Electronic Publishing.

Both of those games landed. Warhawk and Twisted Metal came out in 1995 into a console with almost nothing on it yet, and Sony immediately contracted two more. The studio started acting like a company with options: an early 1997 arrangement with Microsoft to publish its own PC titles, a signing as a Nintendo 64 developer later the same year. Neither produced a single shipped product.

What it did produce was a dispute. Sony owned everything SingleTrac had made for it, down to the cars, and the studio went looking for a publisher that would let it own something. GT Interactive announced the purchase in June 1997 and closed it in October for 14.7 million dollars, 5.4 million of that in cash. There were about seventy people in the building at the time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the same games under other names ~

The next three years are a strange exercise in remaking your own work from memory. Critical Depth in 1997 was vehicular combat underwater. Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012, in October 1998, put a passenger in the car and was otherwise the genre its own authors had invented and were no longer permitted to name. The third of them was Streak: Hoverboard Racing, from the Jet Moto team, which GameSpot scored at 5.1 out of 10.

The developer's name was never on anything a player looked at anyway. The disc said Sony, and then it said GT Interactive. I could not have told you who made Twisted Metal at the time, and almost nobody outside the industry could have either, which is the ordinary condition of a work-for-hire studio and also the reason so few of them get remembered when they go.

~ who left and when ~

In 1999 a group walked out and started Incognito in the same city, with Scott Campbell running it. Sony signed the new company almost immediately, bought it outright in 2002, and handed it the franchises SingleTrac had built. That story has its own grave here and does not need retelling; the relevant part is that the people were never the problem, and Sony knew exactly where they had gone.

GT Interactive, meanwhile, was coming apart. Revenue fell thirty percent to 408 million dollars in 1999 and the company posted a 254 million dollar loss. Infogrames announced on 16 November that it would take seventy percent for 135 million and assume the debt, and completed the deal on 17 December. Cavedog was shut in February 2000 as part of the cleanup. Salt Lake City went the same way that year.

~ the last one ~

The final SingleTrac product was Animorphs: Shattered Reality, a PlayStation platformer based on a Scholastic book series, published by Infogrames on 6 September 2000. Five years after Twisted Metal, the studio that defined an entire PlayStation genre closed having spent its last contract on a licensed tie-in for children, for a publisher in France that had owned it for nine months.

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