Wideload Games

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

~ the eulogy ~

Disney Interactive cut about twenty-six percent of its staff on 6 March 2014, close to seven hundred people, and told the press it was shrinking its internal development teams to concentrate on mobile. A Disney representative confirmed to Gamasutra the same day that Wideload Games in Chicago was one of the studios shut as part of it. No separate announcement was made for the studio itself.

It had been founded in 2003 by Alexander Seropian and six other people out of the same company, which was Bungie. Seropian co-founded that one too, and spent the 1990s on Marathon and Myth before Halo arrived. Microsoft had bought Bungie three years earlier and moved it to Redmond. The new studio went up in Chicago instead, where Bungie itself had started in 1991.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse arrived in the fall of 2005 through Aspyr, on the Xbox and on Windows and Mac, and the joke was that you were the zombie. Then came two 2008 releases, Cyclomite in March on the InstantAction platform under a label called Wideload Shorts, and Hail to the Chimp on 23 June through Gamecock Media Group. Disney bought the studio on 8 September 2009. What followed was a Wii party game called Guilty Party, then a reassignment to phones once Disney Interactive reorganized, starting with the Marvel game Avengers Initiative. Seropian left Disney in February 2012, two years before the studio closed.

Halo was the Xbox's entire argument and the Xbox was barely present in Turkey, where that decade ran on PCs and on the PlayStation 2. The founding of Wideload reached me as industry news about other people, a famous designer's second act in a business I followed through magazines and forums rather than through a console under the television.

~ the dossier ~

~ the small-core bet ~

Wideload's structure was its pitch. A small permanent core did design and code, and most of the production work went to external developers hired per project. The stated goal was to push back against development costs that were climbing out of reach, and to show that a company with modest funds could still put out something that sold.

The same logic explains the engine. Seropian licensed Halo's rather than writing one, on the reasoning that Halo 2's engine was still being built while the first one was finished and the team already knew it inside out. Competing with id and Epic on technology was not a fight a seven-person startup wanted. Stubbs the Zombie therefore runs on the engine Bungie built, pointed at a 1950s retro-future city and a protagonist who eats the brains of the people living in it.

~ the hippo ~

The studio was called Wideload, so it put a cartoon hippo at the top of its homepage and left it there for years. That is the kind of joke a company makes while the seven people who chose the name are still the only ones working under it.

~ what disney was doing ~

The 2014 cuts were about Disney Infinity, which was the company's big bet on toys that unlock game characters and which was not growing fast enough to keep the rest of the division funded. Disney kept cutting after that and left self-published games altogether in 2016, licensing its characters to other publishers instead.

wideload.com answers with a bare 403 today, the kind a shared host returns for a domain nobody has configured. The Internet Archive still has the 2006 site with the hippo on it, along with the images directory underneath it.

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