VIS Entertainment

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

~ the last words ~

Chris van der Kuyl and Peter Baillie started VIS Interactive in Edinburgh in 1996, with some developers out of DMA Design and some people from outside games entirely. Scotland in the late nineties had a real claim on this industry, because Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto had both come from Dundee, and a studio founded there could hire people who had shipped something enormous.

The first six years of work were mostly licensed. H.E.D.Z. went out through Hasbro Interactive in 1998, Earthworm Jim 3D followed in 1999, and then came several years of cartoon properties: Tom and Jerry twice, the Powerpuff Girls twice, published by whoever held the rights that season. This is honest work and it keeps a building full of people employed. It does not build a company that owns anything.

The name changed to VIS Entertainment in 2000, and in 2002 the studio shipped the game it is actually remembered for.

~ the record ~

~ the riot game ~

State of Emergency came out on the PlayStation 2 in February 2002, published by Rockstar four months after Grand Theft Auto III had rewritten what that label meant. The premise was a corporation running a city and a crowd rioting against it, and the technical point of the thing was the crowd: hundreds of bodies on screen at once, every one of them reacting, on a console that should not have been able to hold them.

It sold, and it got an argument going. A game whose selling point was a controllable riot, released five months after September 2001 and carrying Rockstar's name on the box, was never going to be reviewed purely on its mechanics. Set the press aside and it stays the one VIS title a person outside this business could put a name to, which is also why somebody was willing to fund a sequel.

None of that reached me directly. In 2002 the machine I used for games was whatever PC the internet cafe had, and those rooms ran Counter-Strike and nothing else worth queueing for, so a PlayStation 2 game about a riot was something you heard described rather than played.

~ the day it died ~

The trouble started well before the end. In 2003 the money owed back to investors left nothing to finish the active projects with, so the Isle of Wight studio closed in July and all its staff went. The London studio, bought from BAM! Entertainment only that April, was announced for closure in September. In November the Dundee joint venture with Telewest cut three quarters of its people, and its one product, an interactive horse racing system for a satellite sports channel, never launched at all.

On 18 February 2004 BAM! Entertainment announced terms to take over the studio and its State of Emergency subsidiary for shares valued at around seven million dollars, and the purchase completed in May. Eleven months after that, on 7 April 2005, VIS went into administration anyway. Tom Maclennan and Kenny Craig of Tenon Recovery took charge, the Dundee studio shut with twenty-six jobs, twenty-eight more went in Edinburgh, and the forty-two people still employed were sent home. The administration itself ran until March 2007, and the entity stayed on the Companies House register, undissolved, until July 2014.

~ the next chapter ~

Twelve days after the administrators arrived, van der Kuyl set up 4J Studios. Its first years went on conversion work nobody wrote about, and then in 2012 it built the Xbox 360 edition of Minecraft and kept building every other console edition for years afterward. More people have played something 4J built than ever heard of VIS Entertainment.

The sequel rights went elsewhere. DC Studios in Glasgow picked up State of Emergency 2 in May 2005 and said it would hire former VIS developers to finish it. What finally shipped under that name in 2006 landed badly, and the few people who still bring it up bring it up as evidence of what a sequel turns into once everyone who built the original has scattered across three cities.

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