Simis Limited

Simis Limited was a development studio especially known for its flight simulator games. It was founded as Bugmine on 28th July 1998 and on 30th August of that year it was renamed Simis. It was established by Jonathan Newth, Ian Baverstock and two other developers from the simulator research team at British Aerospace. They brought their knowledge of aerospace engineering, physics and computer science to flight simulator games.

Interdictor marked the studio's first release in 1989 and is credited as the first flight simulator to be released for the Acorn Archimedes. British publication The Micro User stated ‘The realism is stunning’.

The sequel to Interdictor II was released in 1991 and is remembered as one of the first flight simulators to ever feature 3D terrain, utilising the powerful new ARM processors of the day. It was built with a complete set of proprietary object and world building tools, which later went on to find a life of their own as Flight Sim Toolkit, a piece of software that gave flight sim fans the tools to create a game of their own. Simis would demonstrate the full power of Flight Sim Toolkit by using it to make the space combat game Absolute Zero in 1995.

Most of the Simis games were published by Domark In 1995, founders Jonathan Newth and Ian Baverstock led the sale of their games division to Domark, retaining a division of Simis focused on medical imaging. Following the sale, Simis merged with Eidos Technologies, Domark and Big Red Software to form the Eidos Interactive Group.

Jonathan and Ian would continue to run Simis as an in-house development studio of Eidos until 1998 when together, they would lead a management buyout of the studio from Eidos Interactive in March 1998 for just £1 and rename the studio Kuju Entertainment. Kuju was originally an offshoot umbrella brand, that housed Simis as a flightsim brand. Later the company fully dissolved into Kuju.

Kuju Entertainment went on to release a number of games including the original Microsoft Train Simulator in 2001, a game whose focus on actively supporting user created content can be traced back to Simis’ Flight Sim Toolkit. Kuju eventually became Europe’s largest external game development studio.

Several game development studios in Guildford today can trace their origin back to Kuju Entertainment and so also trace their origin back to Simis.