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Irrational No More

Posted by Zonk on from the not-even-on-the-demo dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Cory Banks at Gamers With Jobs has an interesting look at Irrational Games becoming '2K Boston'/'2K Australia' on the eve of the Bioshock release. It's not just about 2K and Irrational, publishers re-naming independents to generic studio names has obviously been going on for a long time. 'Rockstar Games is often credited with the Grand Theft Auto series, but the games were developed by Scottish developer DMA Designs, who were bought by Rockstar in 2002, shortly after GTA III came out, and quickly renamed Rockstar North to build up the brand recognition associated with the mega-blockbuster. Rockstar isn't even a development company at all, but a collection of development studios owned by Take-Two, sharing one brand name. The general public hardly knows the difference.'"

15 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad... by bomanbot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...another great developer studio getting swallowed up into a publisher, like Bullfrog or Origin or countless others.

    Irrational Games was especially impressive to me because they produced some very diverse and excellent games, besides Bioshock they also made the spiritual precedessor System Shock 2 and they also developed the awesome and (IMO) underrated Freedom Force games.

    So goodbye Irrational Games, I hope 2K Games will be better to you than EA was to Bullfrog and Origin.

    1. Re:Too bad... by I'll+Provide+The+War · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Freedom Force was very highly rated by the major sources. It is above Doom 3, Call of Duty 2 and Diablo II on Gamerankings.

    2. Re:Too bad... by atomicstrawberry · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, System Shock 2 (and a pile of other excellent games) were by Looking Glass Studios. When Looking Glass Studios died, a few of them got together and formed Irrational Games. They may have some of the same developers, but saying that Irrational developed System Shock 2 isn't strictly true.

    3. Re:Too bad... by Zeussy · · Score: 2, Informative

      Ding, you have the correct answer. Looking Glass went to Irrational to co-produce the game.

      --
      Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
  2. Sad but true... by ravyne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Its currently a sad fact that the game's industry is becoming more and more anonymous in many ways. There are so incredibly few "superstar" game developers - Miyamoto, Carmack, Wright, Kojima, Itagaki... If I spent some time thinking, I could probably come up with 10 or so names that have some notoriety outside of very small circles. Smaller devs are being assimilated by the big players, team sizes are growing nearly exponentially with each new generation. Its becoming a commodity business, where faceless masses simply provide a product; and it takes a great deal of personality out of the industry.

    On top of that, the publishing model works much like the music industry -- The publisher fronts money to the devs, and they don't see a profit until their royalties have paid off the development in full, sometimes with interest. Thats why there's so little innovation, and thats why a single bad title can fold a studio.

    1. Re:Sad but true... by Control+Group · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I don't think it's quite as bleak as all that. Yes, it takes larger and larger teams to produce the full-immersion virtual worlds of GTA, Elder Scrolls, or Gears of War. But that doesn't necessarily have to be as depressing as you make it out to be.

      For one thing, the full-on AAA title can still take its direction - its flavor, focus, feel, and maybe another word that starts with f or two - from one person. I think we can, as we so often do, look to the movie industry for the logical end point of this sequence. It takes a massive army of people to produce a modern movie. But that doesn't mean that you can't have individual people make names for themselves. Peter Jackson, Guy Ritchie, the Wachowskis, etc. all put their distinct stamp on a work. The key is to have someone making the top-level decisions who has a good vision to work towards.

      The other encouraging thing, of course, is that we aren't at a point yet where it's impossible to make a quality, even popular, by yourself or with a small group of people. Geometry Wars and Line Rider come quickly to mind as examples. The bar is higher than it used to be, of course: the hobbyist/garage developer is forced to compete solely on gameplay, since they have no hope of competing with iD's, Epic's, or Valve's latest engine (although the availability of a product like Torque makes even this statement not as damning as it could be).

      But I don't think we're at a terribly high risk of entering an era where individual names are lost to a sea of undifferentiated product. Your Mark Reins, CliffyBs, and Peter Molyneauxs are and will continue to be pivotal figures in the industry. I think we're going to continue to see such names come up.

      The only risk I see on the horizon, really, is if PC gaming eventually dies. Right now, there is no real publishing barrier to entry into the market. If your game really is good enough, all you need is a web site and a file host. Consoles, however, change that dynamic. Maybe Microsoft's nascent foray into user-produced games will eventually turn into a real option for hobbyists, but if it doesn't, there's still no way to break into the console games industry unless you're already established.

      Which is a shame, because there could be fantastic potential, there.

      --

      Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
    2. Re:Sad but true... by Ren.Tamek · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Maybe Microsoft's nascent foray into user-produced games will eventually turn into a real option for hobbyists

      Actually, the puropse of Microsoft's XNA is both transparent and selfish, and has nothing to do with hobby games development. Xbox 360 games dev kits are sold to Universities at a cheap rate, along with Microsoft certified training on their 'XNA' system, which co-incidentally isn't very much like any other programming language used to make games that was ever created. Once a large enough pool of students have learned to exclusively use their system, they simply have to wait until a Microsoft-approved company comes along and skimms off the real talent, because no-one apart from Microsoft can progress them from what they've learned from XNA to real games development. Everyone else is buggered, which co-incidentally (or not) hampers other developers looking for graduate talent, because they haven't learned to dev with real software packages. They're just farming students for their company in a new and inventive way.

      Sony, the big bad guy this generation, provided PS2 dev kits *last generation* to universities in much the same way. Except they all ran linux, and students learned to developed games in C. All the pros of microsofts approach and none of the cons, with the additional benefit of hobbyists being able to buy all the hardware themselves (for about £100 here in the UK).

      --
      "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
  3. what? by u8i9o0 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Take-Two bought DMA Designs in September 1999.
    Take-Two is the parent company of Rockstar Games.
    In 2002, all they did was rename DMA Designs to Rockstar Studios.
    (see: March 19, 2002)

    The overall issue: companyA is now called companyB.
    From my experience, the biggest impact of a company name change is that a lot of stationary needs to be replaced.

    From the article:

    Even in a community as level-headed as this, the thread about the name change is ruthless, posters furious that Take-Two would claim any credit for the eventual success of BioShock and sully Irrational's good name with brand recognition bollocks.
    Maybe I'm crazy but perhaps they'll re-brand it because they pay for everything.
    --
    This is not my sig
  4. Re:The general public doesn't care by CatrionaMcM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Not only won't the general public notice the swallowing of small developers, they wouldn't care if they did. Why should they?" They should care, because the small developers are the ones with a bigger incentive to try something new. If they make a bland, generic game that's just like all the other bland, generic games in the genre, the general public will buy a ever-so-slightly different generic game from the big studio name they recognise. If a small developer makes something new, then they have a better chance of getting noticed. (Yeah, I'm an optimist)

  5. DMA Lemmings by Jonah+Hex · · Score: 3, Informative

    DMA before they became Rockstar North - Creators of one of the best puzzle games ever, which crossed sex and age barriers, Lemmings. Those green guys with the purple wavy hairdos truly rocked.

    Jonah HEX

    --
    Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
    1. Re:DMA Lemmings by Das+Modell · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A DMA game published by Psygnosis. Now DMA is Rockstar North and Psygnosis is somewhere in the bowels of Sony, called SCE Studio Liverpool. Now Irrational is just 2K Boston/2K Australia which doesn't even make any fucking sense.

      I don't like this development. Soon we'll just have games developed and published by EA, 2K, Sony or Ubisoft. Kind of like if movies were primarily identified with the studio that released them, as opposed to the director, writer, producers and actors.

      Is this really useful for publishers? Why do they want to make everything anonymous? If Irrational Games is making a name for itself, what's the benefit in getting rid of the name?

    2. Re:DMA Lemmings by biovoid · · Score: 2, Informative

      Those pink guys with the green wavy hairdos and blue tunics truly rocked.

      Fixed! :)

    3. Re:DMA Lemmings by Swift(void) · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't like this development. Soon we'll just have games developed and published by EA, 2K, Sony or Ubisoft. Kind of like if movies were primarily identified with the studio that released them, as opposed to the director, writer, producers and actors.
      When the starting credits sequence rolls on movies, it is almost universal that the movie and production studios that were involved in the title have their logos appear on screen first, before even the actors names. I dare say what you suggest is exactly what the movie studios would want.
  6. Its all about brands. by MidniteNeko · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A small game development company/indie developer cannot afford all this publicity and ads. Not to mention they are unknown and new to begin with. A large company with a recognized brand will get more buyers and will spend much less effort to launch a new game. If Indie Game developers would cooperate on advertising and concentrate their games under single brand people would recognize and buy these games.(Yeah, they wouldn't be "Indie" anymore in the strict meaning of term.)

  7. It's not about the name by Bagggy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As some others here have said, its largely not about the name. It's not like 2K didn't already own Irrational Games. They've had the option to change the name if they so wished for awhile now. The Dev team at Irrational is not physically changing in any way. All the guys are still there. So it really doesn't matter unless they fire everyone on the team from Irrational, which is quite frankly, completely irrational. Why would you rename a studio and then just dissolve it?

    If there is one thing slightly upsetting about this situation, it's that Irrational Games is a much more awesome studio name than 2K Games.