“We were expecting some kind of redundancies.”
Cakebread was out of the office the day it happened, January 20th, 2011. Despite his industry fame, he was still several pay-grades below the major action swirling around the studio. But the grapevine was ripe with rumors of some drastic negative action at the studio. Blur hadn’t become the Need for Speed-killer that Activision wanted and Blood Stone wasn’t winning over critics or Bond fans. But Cakebread didn’t think they’d shut down the entire studio. “.I went out at twelve, they called everyone into one office and announced it at one, and I had literally just got home and was about to sit down at my PC when
that phone call came through.” Cakebread says it was a shame that two hundred people, himself included, instantly lost their jobs, but he harbors no animosity toward Activision for making the decision. “They’re a company, they’re a business, they’re just kinda doing it. They’re more a machine than anything else; it’s like being mad at a toaster.” For his part, Cakebread is sad that some brand new tech the back-end team at Bizarre was working on will never see the light of day, but to understand why that was disappointing to him is to slightly understand the mind of Stephen Cakebread.
Not long after the demise of Bizarre Creations, a trio of new studios emerged: Lucid Games, Grubby Hands, and Hogrocket, where Cakebread, level designer Peter Collier, and community manager Ben Ward created the iOS puzzle game Tiny Invaders. Cakebread suggests the demise of the large UK developer may really just be natural selection. “When one [big studio] goes down, another three [indie studios] appear pop up in its place. There are more indie developers than ever here.”
Cakebread Now.
So what has Cakebread been playing lately? Not a whole lot, he admits, but he’s heavy on the indie digest with titles like Limbo. He bought Gears of War 3 and hasn’t finished it. He and a friend played through the original Halo and when the Anniversary Edition dropped a month later, they played through it again. “I just fucking love Halo.” He even has a love/hate relationship with Diablo 3, but not because of its server issues. “The auction house ruined it, I think. It’s too easy to game. After Act II, I never used my job.” Of course, he says he’s put more time into Diablo 3 than any other title in the past five years. For his part, he doesn’t know if we need next generation consoles, but “there will always be room for a ‘sit down in front of a TV’ experience. It may be very different. It may be a PC. I don’t know how motion controls will work as these consoles are handed down and become bedroom experiences instead of living room experiences.”
With Hogrocket on hold while individual members chase solo efforts, Cakebread says he’s working on a new title and it’ll probably be a PC game. “iOS and PC development provide a path of least resistance.” He’s far away from a business model at the moment, but that’s because he just wants to make games. To those who aspire to get inside the industry, he suggests, “make games. Just start doing it. release games.”
UPDATE: I’ve updated various misspellings and updated the article’s reference to an early Geometry Wars Pong mode, as well as the circumstances in which Cakebread says he received word on the studio’s closure.
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