Tag Archives: sarah chudley

Bizarre Creations’ creative director, Martyn Chudley, has said that before the firm’s buyout by Activision, Bizarre was doing well financially and had “several potential projects” to work on.

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The first shots of Bizarre Creations racer Blur have been released. They’re on Edge.

There’s an interview with Bizarre bosses Martyn and Sarah Chudley there as well.

Acti Blizz is putting out full-year figures tonight, so expect to hear more on it then.

For now, look away. It’s out at the end of this year.

Speaking to VG247 at Develop today, Bizarre Creations head Sarah Chudley said that Activision, and not Microsoft, bought the Gotham developer as Microsoft’s “internal structure probably wasn’t in the right place to buy things at the time.”

“Obviously as the publisher they had to know what was going on, but their internal structure probably wasn’t in the right place to buy things at the time,” she said.

“And they’re a single format. OK, Xbox is doing fantastically, but who knows what’s going to happen in the future?

“Multi-platform is the only way.”

Chudley said that the approach from Activision came as a surprise but forced the developer to take a reality check.

“We weren’t up for sale. We absolutely weren’t up for sale. It wasn’t a case of, ‘Let’s go and pitch and sell ourselves,’” said the exec.

“We just got to the point where we were looking forward. The Club took us about a year to sign up. A year is a long time when you’ve got 50 staff sitting there twiddling their thumbs in early development stages, because obviously the publisher has quite an influence into what type of game is made.

“We’ve got a lot of money in the bank, but that used to be five years’ worth of money, and then three year’s worth of money. And then you think, ‘Well, there are a lot of people resting on this.’”

Chudley told us that selling the firm had allowed her and husband – Martin Chudley – to get back to what they enjoyed about the games industry in the first place.

“We’re not big business people,” she said. “We didn’t get into the games industry to be all-powerful, all expanding. It got to the point where we weren’t enjoying it.”

Develop concludes today.

Speaking to VG247 at Develop in Brighton today, Bizarre Creations boss Sarah Chudley has revealed that the Activision-owned developer co-owns Project Gotham Racing’s Kudos dynamic.

Although the firm can still use the series’ trademark idea, however, the notion of a Bizzare-developed fifth game in the much-loved racing series – being considered after the release of Gotham 4 under Microsoft – died when the firm sold to Kotick’s publisher.

“Gotham’s owned by Microsoft,” said Chudley. “They will be doing with Gotham whatever they want. So no, we’ve said goodbye to the Gotham series.

“We still own the Kudos element,” she added. “We have a joint patent with Microsoft, so that’s something we could use in the future if we wanted to.”

Gotham 5 was being mooted at Bizarre when Activision moved on the developer.

“We were thinking about what to do in the future,” said Chudley. “Do we do Gotham 5? Do we stay with Microsoft, do we look for another publisher? Obviously we have a great relationship with Sega, so do we go down that route?

“And it was at that point that Activision came along and said, ‘Look guys, we need a really good racing game.’”

As well as deciding future direction, selling to Activision has given the company air to breathe away from Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport, said the exec.

“Obviously, Microsoft’s very protective of its Forza brand, and Gotham had to fit into that. So, going forward, we were obviously going to be restricted about what we could do, and now we’re not.

“I mean literally, Activision has said, ‘Just go and do the game you want to do,’ which has been absolutely amazing. It seems to have gone down very well.”

Chudley told us that the firm is working on two projects under Activision, one of which is, unsurprisingly, petrol-related.

“I think they obviously said that since they haven’t got any racing in their portfolio, I think it’s pretty obvious that there is a racing game coming up,” she said.