Warthog Games

» see warthog.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Warthog started in April 1997 in Cheadle Hulme, a suburb south of Stockport, and the core of it came out of Electronic Arts. The people who left had just worked on Privateer 2: The Darkening, so the new studio arrived with a specialty already attached to it: cockpits and space you could fly through. The figures recorded against the studio's name are over 330,000 units for Starlancer, mostly on PC, and over 230,000 for Star Trek: Invasion on the PlayStation. For a British studio of that size in that decade, those are respectable numbers rather than famous ones, which describes most of what Warthog did.

From 1999 the work broadened into licensed children's titles, where the cash was steadier and the names were borrowed, Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes among them. By 2002 and 2003 the company had become a small group, buying a Swedish studio that had been Atod AB and an Austin outfit that had been Fever Pitch Studios, renamed Warthog Texas on 6 February 2003. The holding company above all of it was Warthog plc, and Warthog plc was already in financial trouble when Tiger Telematics came to buy it in 2004 for a reported eight million dollars or so, part cash and part shares in Tiger.

The Gizmondo never went on sale in Turkey. The handheld everyone around me carried in 2005 was a Game Boy Advance, and the Gizmondo arrived in my awareness years later, as a story about a Ferrari Enzo wrapped around a pole in Malibu. The studio itself was renamed Gizmondo Studios Manchester Limited on 11 April 2005. Put that beside the founding and the arc reads plainly enough: the company that made space sims in Stockport spent its last year building games for a handheld almost nobody bought.

~ the case file ~

~ the space sims ~

The flight-sim specialty was the studio's identity for its first half. It was also a narrowing market. Space combat on a home computer was a 1990s genre with a 1990s audience, and by about 2000 the money had moved to licensed platform games and to consoles. Warthog followed the money, which is what a studio with a payroll does, and the catalog from 1999 onward reads like a contract shop rather than an authored one.

There was an academic side to it that is worth recording because so few studios bothered. Warthog was affiliated with Manchester Metropolitan University's Computer Games Technology course, gave feedback on what the course taught, and took third-year students on placement. A studio that lasts almost nine years in one town accumulates that kind of obligation, and when it goes the obligation goes with it.

~ the gizmondo years ~

Tiger Telematics bought Warthog to feed the Gizmondo, a handheld with a camera and GPS, sold on a business model built around showing you advertisements. The Cheadle studio and the Swedish one were folded together as Gizmondo Europe; Warthog Texas became Gizmondo Texas. The pipeline that came out of that arrangement is almost entirely a list of games nobody played, with Momma Can I Mow the Lawn and Johnny Whatever at the top of it.

Johnny Whatever is the one worth following. It was announced on 20 July 2004 as a third-person action game about a punk who fought with his guitar, and it started life on PlayStation 2 and Xbox before Tiger's purchase made it a Gizmondo exclusive. The release was scheduled for September 2006. A demo was built and never shipped. When the liquidations came, ownership of the game went back to the chief executive of Warthog Games, which is a tidy summary of what the acquisition had actually accomplished.

~ what the register says ~

Companies House returns page not found for company 03346048, because the company has been dissolved too long for the current service to carry it, so the London Gazette is the only surviving official record. It is a good one. On 1 March 2006 a notice went out under section 98 of the Insolvency Act 1986 calling a meeting of creditors. On 8 March 2006 an extraordinary meeting of the members was held at the offices of David Rubin & Partners, Pearl Assurance House, 319 Ballards Lane, London N12 8LY, and passed a resolution stating that the company could not, by reason of its liabilities, continue its business. Asher Miller was appointed liquidator. Both notices were published on 20 March 2006.

The same notice carries the chain of names in one line: company 03346048, Gizmondo Studios Manchester Limited, previously Warthog Games Limited until 11 April 2005, and before that Warthog PLC. Tiger's own British subsidiary went separately and harder, as Gizmondo Europe Limited, company 04620348, which had been Gametrac Europe Limited and before that Tiger Telematics Europe Limited, and which took a compulsory winding-up order published on 20 June 2006 and was not formally dissolved until 5 October 2021. Fifteen years of paperwork for a console that lasted eighteen months on sale.

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