Bizarre Creations, Ltd.

Overview

Development studio Bizarre Creations is based in the North-West of England (UK) and originally started when Martyn Chudley, MD, started a games company called Raising Hell Software after leaving school in 1987. His first game was a budget title for the Commodore 64. After that start, a demo got sent to Psygnosis (now SCEE Studio Liverpool), which then consisted of just ten people. That demo became The Killing Game Show, and was followed by two titles for the Genesis: Fatal Rewind (a port of the The Killing Game Show) and Wiz 'n' Liz.

With the advent of the PlayStation came along, one-man development teams no longer seemed possible and so Bizarre Creations was born. The team started as five people, working on a concept project, from which they were offered the chance to create a game around the Formula 1 license. Bizarre Creations quickly became 11 people, and Formula 1 (1996), officially the company's first game, was created in fourteen months. It was the best selling game in Europe in 1996 on any format, and the PlayStation's second best seller worldwide. Formula 1 Championship Edition followed this success and brought the team up to twenty people by 1998.

With the arrival of the next generation of consoles, Bizarre Creations was chosen as a 1.5 party developer for SEGA's Dreamcast console. Their SEGA title Metropolis Street Racer was released in 2000. At the same time, the company was also creating Fur Fighters, a cartoon adventure game with a definite adult slant. The project was released by Acclaim in 2000 on Dreamcast and PC, and a much enhanced PlayStation 2 version in 2001.

The MSR team moved on to develop Project Gotham Racing, a launch title for Microsoft's Xbox console. This became the second best selling launch title for the console and the team soon started working on the sequel Project Gotham Racing 2. At the same time the Fur Fighters team completed two games for Disney, tied into the animated feature film Disney's Treasure Planet. By that time, the company had grown to 65 people and then consisted of four development teams: the Gotham team, the Smokescreen team, Team Nightmare and Team Limbo.

The company boasts a love for games over business, with quite a few developers without degrees. The company says some of the members have been a ex-dish-washer, shelf-stacker, fork-lift truck driver, bacon packer, accountant and quite a few ex-games testers.

More recently, the company has been continuing the Project Gotham with a third (2005) and a fourth game (2007). Next to the big budget title The Club (2008), they have also been doing a lot of smaller games for the Xbox 360's Live Arcade, such as Boom Boom Rocket (2007) and the very successful Geometry Wars series.

In September 2007 the company was acquired by Activision.

Currently, Bizarre Creations is working on the racing game Blur, which is planned to launch in fall 2009 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

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