Zipper Interactive

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

~ the obituary ~

There was a headset in the box. That is the part worth starting with, because in August 2002 a plastic USB earpiece packed alongside a PlayStation 2 disc was a stranger object than it sounds now. SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs was the first PS2 game to use it, and what it bought you was the ability to say something out loud to four other people through a television. Console gaming had been a thing you did in a room with the people you could see. Zipper Interactive shipped the accessory that ended that.

The studio was founded in Redmond, Washington in June 1995 by Jim Bosler and Brian Soderberg, and for the first six years it made PC games. DeathDrome in 1996, Top Gun: Hornet's Nest in 1998, then Recoil and MechWarrior 3 in 1999 and Crimson Skies in 2000. That is a competent Windows developer with a taste for vehicles and cockpits, and nothing about it predicts what came next.

What came next was a partnership with the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command and a squad shooter published by Sony. SOCOM sold two million copies by November 2003 and three and a half million by May 2005, and it did the thing that mattered more than the numbers: it made online play a normal expectation for a console rather than an enthusiast configuration. Four sequels and two PSP entries followed inside four years. Sony bought the studio outright on 25 January 2006.

The half of this studio I could actually see was the first half. MechWarrior 3 and Crimson Skies were Windows games in the years I was on a dial-up modem, and they circulated here the way PC games circulated here, which is to say widely and not always legally. Then Zipper went console-exclusive and effectively vanished from view. Playing SOCOM online in Turkey in 2003 would have meant a PS2, a network adapter, a broadband line at home and a server on another continent, and the gaming that happened around me in those years happened on PCs in rented rooms. I read about SOCOM. I never heard anyone through that headset.

~ the case file ~

~ the ambition ~

MAG arrived on 26 January 2010 and it was not a modest idea. Two hundred and fifty six players in a single match, on a PlayStation 3, with a command hierarchy layered on top so that the whole thing did not collapse into noise. Guinness certified it as the most players in a console first-person shooter. It was online-only, with nothing left on the disc to do once the servers went, which was a bet on permanence that no studio should make.

SOCOM 4 followed in 2011 and Unit 13 for the PlayStation Vita in March 2012. Unit 13 shipped on 6 March. The studio was closed twenty-three days later.

~ the day it died ~

Sony announced the closure on 29 March 2012 and confirmed it on 30 March. The stated reason was resource re-alignment. Zipper had two unannounced PlayStation 4 titles in development at the time, another SOCOM and a new first-person shooter intended as an original property, and both were cancelled once the closure completed.

Then the second death, five months later. On 31 August 2012 Sony shut down the online servers for the PlayStation 2 and PSP SOCOM titles. The studio was already gone by then, so there was nobody left to argue about it. A game built around talking to strangers went silent, and the headsets in all those boxes became a plastic earpiece with a USB plug on the end.

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