Studio Profile
How two university students shook up the British game industry with a refreshing blend of ambition and sustainability
How Mediatonic shook up the British game industry with a blend of ambition and sustainability
As the story often goes, it started with two friends in the pub, and “some drinking was involved,” Paul Croft says. He and fellow Brunel University student Dave Bailey were studying for degrees in programming and computer graphics, and were trading project ideas. Croft had been making Flash games for fun since the tender age of 15, and popular browser game site Miniclip had recently opened its now-substantial coffers to him. “Well,” he laughs, “they gave me £600 for my first game, which I thought was more money than I’d ever get in the world.” Why not continue to tap the source of these unlimited riches, and officially start a business?
They figured they could align their efforts to build a company with their coursework and, after a bit of poking about, managed to rustle up a tiny office in a science park at the back of the university, “so that we would have a proper address,” Bailey says. “But basically, we ran the business from our student house, and I would just run out of lectures when the phone rang.”
Thanks to Croft’s contacts and the ongoing dot-com boom, this happened often. They were quickly working with some huge companies, who needed them to do the (then arcane) job of creating and installing things for people to do on their websites. “EA had a massive portal called Pogo,” Bailey recalls, “which had all these puzzle games, and things not a million miles away from Miniclip.” EA was using free demos that required a download to play, and then a payment to upgrade to the full version. “But they felt the barrier was quite high to go through all of that to buy a game. And so our idea was, ‘What if we take your games, and push them out onto the Internet, and then people could try them out without downloading anything? And then they’ll maybe come back to your website.’”
It was such a good idea, in fact, that Croft and Bailey decided they’d better attend a few conferences in between their classes, and start pitching it. “Never having been to a games conference before, I think we both went wearing suits,” Croft grins. But the effort was worth it: soon, they had the attention of companies such as EA, Sega and PopCap. “When we started tapping into that casual game space, it was great for us because no one was really doing it. There were still relatively few businesses using Flash, and building games in Flash. So the challenge was getting these games to work, and really represent the real thing.” The first big success was match-three game Bejeweled, with Croft essentially having to rewrite the majority of the game for Flash from scratch, with just a single artist redrawing the graphics from bitmap to vector so that they’d scale properly.
Despite this lean early iteration of Mediatonic, it ended up working on some of the biggest casual games ever: Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files and Bookworm among them. “It was a lot in the early years,” Croft says. “They all sort of layered on top of each other, and we’d be working on loads of different games at the same time. We’d be doing maybe 20 or more of these games a year.” They were riding a wave of momentum. “Early on, we were really opportunistic,” Bailey laughs. “We just had this desire to do stuff. Wherever we saw opportunities, we were just doing it, and enjoying the business growing.” Each new client, from Sega to Sony to Nickelodeon, felt like another rung on the ladder they were climbing. And as their experience mounted, so did their confidence, until they felt ready to “do more than just port someone else’s baby,” as Bailey puts it.
2008’s Amateur Surgeon was the first of Mediatonic’s larger original projects. As fans of the Trauma Center series, Croft and Bailey liked the idea of making a surgery sim game with more of an irreverent, comedic tone. “I remember pitching it to Adult Swim, and asking for quite a lot of money at the time, and them coming back and saying, ‘We want to pay you twice as much,’ and that being completely mind-blowing.”
Amateur Surgeon exploded online, garnering a transformational 56 million plays. Mediatonic was firmly on the map.
Diversification was key: the aim was always to move away from the often hand-to-mouth process of making games, and towards something sustainable. “That was initially an instinctive thing, but it’s grown into being something that is fundamentally part of the decisions that we make,” Bailey says. When some investors suggested they narrow their focus to a certain platform or genre, they pushed back. “2009 was a really good moment for console, and there was a lot of pressure on us at that time to go headlong into console growth. People would go, ‘Why do you bother with all these web games and mobile games? Why don’t you just go after console?’ And for us, console has become really important, but it’s one element of it.”
Indeed, while the firm would start developing for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2010, it continued to make mobile and web games, the headcount now between 70 and 100 people in a much larger office in London, partially funded by venture capital. The approach has paid dividends in terms of long-term partnerships and huge licences: making web games such as Toy Story: Woody’s Great Escape for Pixar in 2009 would lead to helping Disney develop web game Superbia. And 2012’s Thundercats: Tree Of The Ancients meant Mediatonic was at the forefront of WB Games’ mind when it came to choosing a partner for Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts: Cases From The Wizarding World. “At the time, [these companies] were happy to work with small businesses,” Bailey says, “because they saw us as kind of avant-garde. We had quite a lot of data as well, because we’d been working that way for years. I think we were lucky because
“WHEREVER WE SAW OPPORTUNITIES, WE WERE JUST DOING IT, AND ENJOYING THE BUSINESS GROWING”
the whole ‘games as a service’ thing wasn’t a huge shock for us – we’d already started figuring out how to look after players and how to run content pipelines. The whole industry was getting used to it, but we were better equipped to cope.”
Indeed, in 2012, Mediatonic would pitch this advantage to investors, citing a desire to ensure that partnerships became less about making a name for themselves, and more about an end result that they could have equal claim to. Going forward, they would claim royalties from the minute the game went live, and then take over the running of the game for the foreseeable future. So it was with 2014’s Heavenstrike Rivals, an original mobile PvP game set in the Final Fantasy universe. Getting to work with Square Enix was a dream partnership, and Mediatonic learned much about running live ops from the Japanese developer. But by this point, the team had already started building its own custom technology to handle its service games – having to work across 13 different European territories with Superbia had made it essential, with different Disney IP live at different stages in different territories, and the game needing to be customised accordingly and instantly, often several times a week. GameFuel was essentially a one-size-fits-all content management system for Mediatonic’s games, removing its need to make a bespoke CMS for each title, and a framework that could be adapted to any of its projects – and still is today.
At the same time in another part of the office, Mediatonic was working on something entirely antithetical to Heavenstrike. Hatoful Boyfriend was a cult hit visual novel with an all-star cast of pigeons: it was conceived by Ed Fear, who was working on Heavenstrike at the time, and who Croft had headhunted after seeing him speak at a writing conference. These days, the studio has a full-time concept team that takes pitches from staff and helps shape them into something solid; it runs game jams, and has built personal development time into the workday so that people can work on their own creative projects (none of which the studio forcibly lays claim to).
This is a studio that can proudly discuss its niche Picross murder mystery game Murder By Numbers in the same breath as mainstream mobile RTS Gears Pop! – although there’s seemingly no way of predicting what Mediatonic will get up to next, Croft and Bailey’s strategy is clear. The studio’s experience and expertise – and now, size, thanks to sister companies such as publisher Irregular Corporation and the recentlyannounced Guildford studio Fortitude – allows them to confidently take on big licences and service games, then use that cushioning to protect and nurture left-of-centre passion projects. “If we have an idea that we love, we want to have the faculty to make that – and we have some big ideas that we’re working on at the moment,” Croft says. “We’re ambitious, but we want to grow in a sustainable way. We’ll never put the business at risk, because what we’ve built is really precious to us. We’ve never downsized, and we want to keep it that way, because our people are the most important thing to us. So that’s led us down this path of building a diverse portfolio of games across a wide range of platforms, which gives us a really stable foundation.”
One recent example of which is that collaboration with The Coalition and Funko Pop, which raised many an eyebrow at E3 2018. (“I think they had to change the order of things at the last minute, because we weren’t meant to be the first Gears Of War thing that was shown,” Bailey laughs.) He goes on to tell us that Rod Fergusson was the person behind it all: when Mediatonic expressed a wish to find an art style that would work well on the smaller scale of a smartphone screen, Fergusson caught sight of his Funko Pops on his desk, and something clicked. “He approached Funko and sort of championed that whole initiative. And it was a really fun, interesting experiment. We were looking at, ‘Well, what can you do to Funko in the Gears Of War universe? Can you chainsaw a Funko in half, and then what happens? Do a bunch of
“WE’RE AMBITIOUS, BUT WE WANT TO
GROW IN A SUSTAINABLE WAY. WE’LL
NEVER PUT THE BUSINESS AT RISK”
plastic organs fall out? Can you melt them with a flamethrower, or is that going too far?’”
It’s one of the best indicators that there is a core tenet that runs through Mediatonic’s work – “We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Croft says. Bailey adds: “And that’s kind of diversified things in our catalogue even more than we might otherwise have done. I think Ed Fear summed it up beautifully the other day: he said, ‘It’s basically games you never knew you wanted.’” The other indicator is the studio’s name, which harks back to that conversation in the pub all those years ago. “It comes back to that whole thing of being a cocktail of stuff – having all these ingredients that make something special that’s more than the sum of its parts. We felt ‘tonic’ was a really nice way to represent that. And there’s something feelgood about a tonic. It’s a bit of light relief.”