Venom Games

~ the obit ~

When Rage Software collapsed in 2003 it left offices on the floor across England, and one of them was in the north east. Peter Johnson picked up the Newcastle team, incorporated as Venom Games Limited in Gateshead, and went looking for work. British studios got born this way all through that decade: a publisher fails, and the staff who are already sitting in one building sign a new lease.

Take-Two bought the company in 2004. On 25 January 2005 the publisher announced a label called 2K to run its development studios, and Venom was moved under it. The first game out was Rocky: Legends in 2004, published by Ubisoft for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, a licensed boxing game built from a film series that was then nearly thirty years old. The last was Don King Presents: Prizefighter in 2008, a licensed boxing game built around a promoter. Five years, and the bookends were the same genre with a different famous name on the front.

Licensed console boxing went to people who bought one sports game a year, on machines that never got much of a foothold in Turkey against the PC. I owned none of it. The single Venom title with a reputation attached came in a box that did not carry the studio's name anywhere on the front.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the port nobody credits ~

Prey came out in 2006 after one of the longest development histories in the business, and it is remembered as a Human Head game and a 3D Realms project. The Xbox 360 version was Venom's. That is an odd credit to carry: the work that reached the most players is the work everyone assumes somebody else did, because a port is a job rather than an identity.

~ 2 july 2008 ~

On 2 July 2008 staff were told the company was due to close at the end of the month. The trade press had it within a day. Take-Two's public line was that it was "assessing the role of Venom Games" and considering "possible redundancies", with nothing final until the consultation with employees had finished. That is corporate language for a decision already taken, waiting on the paperwork to catch up with it.

Prizefighter had been on shelves for weeks. The studio closed that year and the name stops appearing in the record afterward. In March 2009 Peter Johnson turned up at Eutechnyx, another north east England studio, as an executive producer. The region kept the people. It just kept losing the companies.

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