Visual Science

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

~ the last words ~

Visual Sciences Limited was founded in Dundee in 1993 by Russell Kay, who came out of DMA Design. Wikipedia calls him the creator of Lemmings; the press release announcing his later sale of the company describes him more carefully as the sole PC programmer on the Lemmings games. Either way he was in the room when it happened, and when he left DMA he founded his own studio in the same small city. The company dropped the plural from its name around 2003 and traded as Visual Science from then on.

From January 1999 it worked closely with Electronic Arts on what became F1 2000, and in June 2000 EA bought 20 percent of it. After that the studio worked for EA more or less exclusively. The output was licensed and sports work. Kay's first credited game was Lemmings Paintball in 1996, published by Psygnosis, which is the same franchise and the same publisher he had left behind at DMA. After that the credits read, in its own trade-press summary, as Electronic Arts' Formula One titles, Medal of Honor: Rising Sun and Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup. The business was healthy on paper. The 2003 financial year brought a turnover of 2.8 million pounds and a pre-tax profit of 100,000 pounds, and the headcount doubled to seventy-five across Dundee and a satellite office in Los Angeles. By July 2004 it was reported to be working on GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, another Medal of Honor and an unannounced project for SCi.

In 2006 I was 22 and the name Visual Science meant nothing to me, which is what contract development does to a studio. The games it built went out under somebody else's logo, and EA titles were everywhere in Turkey. I may well have played something these people built without the studio's name registering at all. Work-for-hire developers live like that, and it explains why nobody outside the trade press noticed when this one stopped existing.

~ the record ~

~ from denial to administration ~

In January 2006 Vivendi Universal Games cancelled an unannounced project the studio was building. Visual Science had just moved into new Dundee offices and had not yet signed the lease. On 27 January Tim Christian, by then the chief executive, told GamesIndustry.biz that the closure rumors were a misunderstanding. He had warned staff not to keep too many personal things in the building, he said, because he was worried the landlord might hear about the lost project and lock the doors. The landlord had rung the previous afternoon to say not to worry. "There's absolutely no point in them locking us out, because we need to be in the building to survive!"

Eleven days later the same outlet reported the administration. "We had a major contract with Vivendi Universal Games which was terminated a couple of weeks ago, and we have been unable to find replacement work in that period," Christian said, adding that it had become unlikely they could meet their liabilities. About 100 people were made redundant. He said the remaining cash would go into a legal fight against VUG for terminating without grounds, and that he was already talking to lawyers. Vivendi declined to comment. No source since shows the case being filed.

~ the dundee arithmetic ~

Christian was not a founder. He arrived in 2003 as non-executive chairman, after running MicroProse and Hasbro Interactive, and brought Andy Campbell in from Red Lemon as commercial director. In January 2005 he bought 55 percent of the shares from Kay and took the chief executive job. Kay stayed on as chief technical officer. Thirteen months after the handover the company was gone, which is less a verdict on the buyer than on what a studio with one publisher is worth when that publisher stops calling.

The paperwork is harder to find than the story. Companies House returns a 404 for SC143724, because its register only indexes dissolutions from 2010 onward, so for a Scottish company that died in 2006 the Gazette is the register of record rather than the companies database. The studio's own domain is for sale: vissci.com now redirects into a broker's lander, which is where the fair-use copy of its logo on Wikipedia was rescued from before it went.

The people stayed in Dundee. Ex-staff founded Cohort Studios in 2006, which shipped Buzz! Junior: Dino Den in February 2008 and announced its own closure on 21 April 2011. Others founded Proper Games the same year, which lasted until an insolvency filing in January 2020.

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