Activision closes Radical Entertainment

Although there are still some employees left at the Canadian Radical Entertainment, the vast majority of the staff will be laid off and the studio will no longer make its own games. The remaining staff will only provide support.

Publisher Activision, owner of the Vancouver-based Radical Entertainment, is taking a firm hold on the studio, which is known for the Prototype games. Although Radical has a ‘very talented team’, Activision is forced to intervene. Both Prototype games “failed to find a commercial audience,” the publisher said. Prototype 2, the final installment in the series, was released earlier this year. Activision evicts most of Radical’s team. Some employees will remain to support ongoing Activision projects. For example, the studio is still working on the PC version of Prototype 2. It will be released on July 27. It is likely that the rest of the team will be fired once those projects are completed.

Radical Entertainment was founded in 1991 and in the early years made games for publishers such as Microsoft and THQ. It was bought in 2005 by Vivendi, the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment, and was allowed to work on Radical-created games such as Scarface: The World Is Yours and Prototype. After the merger of Activision and Blizzard Entertainment in 2008, Radical came under the care of Activision. The publisher immediately intervened with Radical, fired part of the Radical team and stopped production of Scarface 2, which at that time was almost finished. Radical also made several games from the Crash Bandicoot series.

In December we paid a visit to Radical Entertainment