Gamasutra contributor Colin Campbell asks: After a decade of nothing but racing games, what other ending could there have been for SCE Studio Liverpool, formerly known as creative powerhouse Psygnosis?
The closure of Sony’s Liverpool Studio, formerly known as Psygnosis, is yet another sorry lesson in what can happen to great entrepreneurial outfits that become subsumed by careless corporate sugar-daddies.
Time and again we’ve seen developers and publishers sucked up by the likes of Sony, Microsoft, EA, THQ and Activision, only to lose their identity and their esprit de corps, that quality of originality that made them so attractive to the buying entity.
Of course, these things are never black and white. It is not possible to pinpoint a single moment when Psygnosis or SCE Studio Liverpool went from being something of immense value to something that apparently needed to be put down.
In recent years, the studio has delivered some great iterations of its Wipeout franchise. Bringing Wipeout 2048 to Vita, featuring cross-play with PS3, was a work of technological and artistic excellence. It is hardly the fault of the developers that Vita has been, and will likely continue to be, a commercial failure unable to sustain a publishing and development ecosystem.
Wipeout HD (2008) for PS3 was another highly competent piece of work, a rejigging of the firm’s two really good PSP racing-combat games of the middle part of the last decade. And stretching back to the PS2 hit Wipeout Fusion (2002) we saw how the developers were still able to bring something fresh to a game-world that had seemed to lose its way.
Interspersed with that was a series of Formula One games for PS2 and PSP, all of which were competent licenses, although nothing to write home about.
You can see a pattern here of limited ambition and limited horizons. Focusing a large studio on racing and racing-combat over the period of an entire decade just doesn’t seem like a smart way to utilize a group of talent. It’s a little like giving Rare nothing to do but Kinect games (imagine that).
Life before Sony
The comparison between SCE Liverpool’s output between 1999 and 2012 with the work Psygnosis - the original name of the studio - did in the previous decade is revealing.
The original company was born from the disaster of Imagine, a rags-to-rich Northern English publisher that enjoyed enormous success before imploding under weak management. Psygnosis sought to do things right. It focused its energies on three things.
First, it made really good-looking games that mostly played well. It brought its efforts to bear on new, emerging platforms. And it marketed the hell out of the games it published, very often brought in from indie developers like DMA Design and Reflections.
Founder Ian Hetherington and his partners understood that gaming was growing, and that they were surrounded by a pool of extreme talent that needed access to these markets. The company worked the media, placed its games in flashy boxes with neat pack-in gifts, and created a brand-identity that still lasts today (that logo, it makes you feel something, right?).
Games like Shadow of the Beast and Lemmings were part of an energetic few years when Psygnosis was a major player in the burgeoning games scene on Amiga and Atari ST.
Sony, looking for some development muscle and managerial expertise for its PlayStation launch, saw the potential and bought the company, a smart move that paid dividends for years to come.
The biggest payoff was in the PlayStation launch game, Wipeout, an ultra-fast, colorful, cool racing game that lit up fashionable magazines of the day, and was featured in trendy nightclubs. This was the game that allowed Sony to market its new console as something for grown-ups, for the hip kids who had grown up with the NES, wanted to keep playing, but needed an identity other than that projected by home computer-owning enthusiasts.
Over the next few years Psygnosis was a prolific provider of awesome hits for PlayStation including Destruction Derby, Colony Wars, G-Police and Rollcage, to name a few.
But as the PlayStation era gave way to PlayStation 2, as the people who had founded Psygnosis moved onto new challenges, and as the company was renamed as part of a corporate restructuring, something was lost.
One of Sony’s core strengths over the past 15 years has been its network of studios, and the games they have produced. Studios like Media Molecule and Naughty Dog have retained their identity, perhaps because they missed the late ‘90s mania for conformity and perhaps for other, internal reasons.
Another of Sony’s strengths, one that has come to light recently and has been something of a surprise, has been the creative and smart ways it has embraced PSN as a retail outlet, as a promotional tool and as a place for creative excellence. The recent launch of Sound Shapes, from tiny indie outfit Queasy Games as well as the company’s love-affair with thatgamecompany, has shown an ability to work with small teams and allow them to flourish artistically.
At present it is unclear what will happen to all of the development staff at SCE Liverpool. It would be nice to think that developers are being invited, and supported, in efforts to create their own indie developments that can go on and help PlayStation shine through PSN. Because studio closures do have a habit of releasing talented individuals and teams who go onto great things.
Here’s hoping that the spirit that made Psygnosis such a fascinating story can still inspire those game developers who are today considering their next move.
"Over the next few years Psygnosis was a prolific provider of awesome hits for PlayStation including Destruction Derby, Colony Wars, G-Police and Rollcage, to name a few."
Small correction, while Destruction Derby, Colony Wars and G-Police were developed and published by Psygnosis, Rollcage (and it's sequel) was only published by Psygnosis. The developer was Attention to Detail who were responsible for the excellent Jaguar Pack-In game Cybermorph.
Apart from that, thanks for the article, Psygnosis was already gone along time ago, but it's sad to see how the last pieces of this once (for the european home computer industry) so important company vanish. They released a lot of mediocre click icons to move your character games, that only relied on their graphics, but they also constantly released games, that pushed the boundaries of what games can do.
Brattacas with it's real time enviroment and almost living characters or the strange real time strategy predecessor Terrorpods will always be amongst the games, that spring to my mind, when it comes to innovative gameplay in the late 1980s.
And oh man, the game covers on this beautiful packages. The closest video game packages ever got to Vinyl covers after the initial EA releases.
Cybermorph will always have a special place in my mind because avgn did an amazing review on it. "where did you learn to fly?" "where did you learn to fly?" "where did you learn to fly?" "where did you-where did you learn to fly?"
do yourself a favor and check it out if you havent already, its in his awesome Jaguar video.
I lately had the chance to play the sequel Battlemorph, impressive game, unfortunately I don't have a backup cartridge for my Jaguar, so I can't save my game and always have to start in the first level. ;)
Now I will be forever unhappy, that I will never see again something like that splash screen of Destruction Derby (when you see that very awesome owl logo turning into the center screw of a chromed wheel... it was pure awesome)
Yeah remember them well from the Amiga days...never actually knew they became part of Sony, I guessed I missed that somewhere along the line. Sad days.
I remember them most for Walker, Wiz n Liz and of course SotB and Lemmings. I didn't know they were connected to Overboard!, Colony Wars, Rollcage, and Alundra; all great games.
Sad that they were reduced to racing titles.
I have so many great memories of playing WipeoutXL linked on PS. Playing G-police and Rollcage on PC is still a delight. Rollcage for PC even had a fix for the wreck bug that the PS game had. On PS it would leave you facing the wrong direction on the track about 90% of the time you wrecked. Even in my older slower age, i picked up WipeoutHD as my first PSN buy soon after i got my PS3. No, i'm not good at the franchies these days but sometimes you just have to support greatness!
"After a decade of nothing but racing games, what other ending could there have been for SCE Studio Liverpool" - Seriously? Bloody hell, you must have been struggling for a way to kick of the article.
By that logic maybe Mick Hocking will turn the gun on his own studio and shut down Evolution after that decade of WRC and Motorstorm. Heck, maybe EA should be considering pulling the plug on Criterion?
After that decade of churning out Halo I guess Bungee are lucky to still be around and DICE must be on borrowed time after that decade of making nothing but shooters.
This is the kind of thing I expect from Eurogamer, not Gamasutra.
RIP Psygnosis. Shadow of the Beast III is still a favorite, as is Lemmings, and ... the list goes on and on. Nobody's mentioned Blood Money, but its theme song is now buzzing through my head. This seems oddly appropriate.
Nice retrospective, but I don't know why you depict racing games so negatively. And in any case, WipEout is nothing like a standard racing game.
The genius of that series wasn't "just" the balance-perfect, ultra-fast gameplay, but that WipEout very subtly explored and developed an entire world, art style and culture of technology, machines and the future. Some of these threads were also explored in G-Police but really there was nothing, is nothing, and likely will be nothing comparable to the Psygnosis vision of the future.
Whenever I read this I marvel at the difference in the British PlayStation culture and the US one. Wipeout in night clubs? I read this kind of stuff, or hear it in conversation, or simply meet British journalists who were around during the PS1 days, and I realize what a MASSIVE difference in the two cultures surrounding PlayStation there was at the time.
It wasn't only a british phenomen, such things could be seen in germany too. In europe in general I think, the PS1 helped consoles to overcome it's image to be toys for kids.
Due to a large part this was prepared by the home computers, which I think were much more common here in europe, then in the US. Because of them games weren't something for kids alone, many teenagers had at a certain point a Spectrum/C64/Amstrad/Atari XL/Atari ST/Amiga at home, but as the NES never was this dominant during the late 80s and early 90s, as it was in the US and Japan, consoles were seen as something for younger players.
That Psygnosis was one of the companies developing games for the Playstation from the very beginning helped a lot to make this console generation look less childish for players back then. And the idea to base their first game Wipeout on electronic club music, using the aesthetics of the techno music scene was also helpful. In the UK this wasn't uncommon, Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 precedented Wipeout and was fairly known amongst the music scene for it's music, as Jeff Minter itself was, because of his light synthesizers, which he performed in public since the late 80s.
In the UK (and the rest of europe who was following the UK back then, when it came to video games) there always was a connection between computer games and pop music, there were games starring famous bands like Franky goes to hollywood or the Thompson Twins.
Later the Bitmap Brothers shaped their image using the mechanisms of a music group, their collaboration with Bomb the Bass for Xenon II helped the song and the game to become extremely popular here in europe.
Last but not least, the Atari 16 Bit machines were popular amongst musicians here in europe, because of their inexpensive midi software (compared to the Mac). I remember Cassandra Complex (a british electronic band from the late 80s) answering why their song was named "Fire and Forget", it was named after the Titus game about cars with guns.
Small correction, while Destruction Derby, Colony Wars and G-Police were developed and published by Psygnosis, Rollcage (and it's sequel) was only published by Psygnosis. The developer was Attention to Detail who were responsible for the excellent Jaguar Pack-In game Cybermorph.
Apart from that, thanks for the article, Psygnosis was already gone along time ago, but it's sad to see how the last pieces of this once (for the european home computer industry) so important company vanish. They released a lot of mediocre click icons to move your character games, that only relied on their graphics, but they also constantly released games, that pushed the boundaries of what games can do.
Brattacas with it's real time enviroment and almost living characters or the strange real time strategy predecessor Terrorpods will always be amongst the games, that spring to my mind, when it comes to innovative gameplay in the late 1980s.
And oh man, the game covers on this beautiful packages. The closest video game packages ever got to Vinyl covers after the initial EA releases.
do yourself a favor and check it out if you havent already, its in his awesome Jaguar video.
And DD was a Ps1 launch title with wipeout.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134865/how_colony_wars_came_to_be.php
Sad that they were reduced to racing titles.
Psygnosis.
* Salute *
By that logic maybe Mick Hocking will turn the gun on his own studio and shut down Evolution after that decade of WRC and Motorstorm. Heck, maybe EA should be considering pulling the plug on Criterion?
After that decade of churning out Halo I guess Bungee are lucky to still be around and DICE must be on borrowed time after that decade of making nothing but shooters.
This is the kind of thing I expect from Eurogamer, not Gamasutra.
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/724.html
Brataccas was my first Psygnosis game. I loved their box art from those days.
The genius of that series wasn't "just" the balance-perfect, ultra-fast gameplay, but that WipEout very subtly explored and developed an entire world, art style and culture of technology, machines and the future. Some of these threads were also explored in G-Police but really there was nothing, is nothing, and likely will be nothing comparable to the Psygnosis vision of the future.
Due to a large part this was prepared by the home computers, which I think were much more common here in europe, then in the US. Because of them games weren't something for kids alone, many teenagers had at a certain point a Spectrum/C64/Amstrad/Atari XL/Atari ST/Amiga at home, but as the NES never was this dominant during the late 80s and early 90s, as it was in the US and Japan, consoles were seen as something for younger players.
That Psygnosis was one of the companies developing games for the Playstation from the very beginning helped a lot to make this console generation look less childish for players back then. And the idea to base their first game Wipeout on electronic club music, using the aesthetics of the techno music scene was also helpful. In the UK this wasn't uncommon, Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 precedented Wipeout and was fairly known amongst the music scene for it's music, as Jeff Minter itself was, because of his light synthesizers, which he performed in public since the late 80s.
In the UK (and the rest of europe who was following the UK back then, when it came to video games) there always was a connection between computer games and pop music, there were games starring famous bands like Franky goes to hollywood or the Thompson Twins.
Later the Bitmap Brothers shaped their image using the mechanisms of a music group, their collaboration with Bomb the Bass for Xenon II helped the song and the game to become extremely popular here in europe.
Last but not least, the Atari 16 Bit machines were popular amongst musicians here in europe, because of their inexpensive midi software (compared to the Mac). I remember Cassandra Complex (a british electronic band from the late 80s) answering why their song was named "Fire and Forget", it was named after the Titus game about cars with guns.