This is not fair to the British people.<p>Take-Two gets massive subsidies to make "british games". Namely the "british cultural game" Grand Theft Auto. How!? Yes, how is GTA a british game? Well you see Take-Two bought Rockstar, which itself was a formerly a fully UK owned company.<p>Now Take-Two has turned around and is buying out one of the UK's few remaining publishers. No doubt the UK will now pay Take-Two yet more generous subsidies to keep Codemasters running.<p>The UK government is literally taxing domestic industries to subsidize an over seas corporation to further buy out UK industry. This is not a cohesive plan. The last thing the UK needs is to hollow out yet more industry.
While I'm sure this makes business sense, I wish this didn't happen as often when it comes to game software companies.<p>I've looked into ownership of old game IP's, for either remake/running on modern systems to asking if they'll make them legally freeware, and finding who owns an old IP after years of buyouts, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies, etc is difficult if not impossible in some cases.
I remember having so much fun playing micromachines with, was it 8 people?, back in the day on the playstation one. We had an L-shaped extension, and we had to share a controller, using just left, right and brake. It was mayhem, and I think the reason I still have my google maps navigation with north always up!<p>Also, I happen to live in Birmingham and commute to Coventry. In the Birmingham museum and art gallery I was surprised to find an Amiga 500 used by the LSD demoscene group on display.
Dizzy was one of my first favourites. "Immersive" would probably be an apt word for it. Amazing how much gameplay they could squeeze into available memory back then.<p>Think I played the first one on an Amstrad with the ol' green screen. They made a lot of decent games.
The thing I find most depressing is that it seems to me games are getting blander and blander as the size of the corporations that create them grows. Code masters games always had a sort of flavour of their own. It's happened to other british development shops like psygnosis (created wipeout, a game with a lot of personality ). Sony bought them and eventually closed them.
Linked in the article, worth checking out, a short feature from the 80s on the nascent business:<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/codemasters/zkdfnrd" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/codemasters/zkdfnrd</a>
There's clearly a connection between the release of Dirt 5 and this announcement, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that is.<p>Can someone with more business sense explain why the timing of this worked out this way?
As a car sim enthusiast I really hope their new owner realizes the mistake they made by making project cars 3 a clone of their other arcade racing games.
Totally off topic, but is there a thing about game studios and being in the middle of nowhere?<p>According to Wikipedia, Codemasters HQ is in Southam, which is a tiny town halfway attractive UK hotspots like Birmingham and Milton Keynes [0].<p>Similarly, Epic is in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh. A bit less "middle of nowhere" than Southam maybe, but still, not particularly San Francisco or London either. What's up with that? Have game studios simply been remote longer? Or do gamedevs actually relocate en-masse to places like Southam and Cary for their jobs? How does this work? What's the employer pitch? "Sure, there's like one bar and half a supermarket, but you'll get to work on cool race games!"? (I'm not being dismissive, I'm genuinely curious if this is "a thing" and if so, how this works)<p>[0] <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2.5115484,8z" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2...</a>