STUDIO PROFILE
How a UK studio went from bedroom modding to a Tencent buyout
Entering Splash Damage’s offices, in the leafy London borough of Bromley, we’re immediately greeted by the studio’s mission statement, filling one of the reception area’s walls: “We make team-based games that forge lifelong friendships”. Our inner cynic might be tempted to write it off as a bit of corporate malarkey, were it not for the rest of the architecture backing up the assertion. The entire ground floor (save for a row of PCs at the far end where an internal playtesting session is currently underway) is a dedicated social space, host to everything from staff boardgame nights to life-drawing classes. Meanwhile, the company’s servers are displayed, behind what we’re told is pressurised glass, at the entrance to the cafeteria. “A home away from home” is how Splash Damage co-founder and CEO Richard Jolly describes it – something that, in the early days, was rather more literally the case.
Back in 2001, the team were based just down the road in Beckenham, at the house of former CEO Paul Wedgwood, where Jolly recalls spending six months sleeping on the floor, on a bed of T-shirts. Those rather less plush surroundings speak to Splash Damage’s origins as “a mod team that went commercial”. Jolly, Wedgwood and Arnout van Meer were three friends determined to take full advantage of the Quake engine source code, made available online for free on the eve of the new millennium.
While many simply used it to cheat in Quake matches, the trio were part of an effort to reimagine Team Fortress, which had started life as a mod for the original Quake before being bought up by Valve and ported across to Half-Life’s (Quake-derived) GoldSrc engine. “A whole bunch of people from the competitive scene got together and started working on it. We called it Quake 3 Fortress,” Jolly says. “And then we got a call from Doug Lombardi at Valve, saying, ‘Sorry, you have to rename it – and every other thing in the game’. They were very nice about it!”
It did, however, catch the attention of Valve in more positive ways. The Bellevue company made an offer to these novice developers – before the formation of Splash Damage – to work on a commercial addon. They declined, Jolly says, because they were insistent on working with their idols at Id Software. “We had no deal [with Id] at the time, so we were just incredibly stupid,” Jolly says. “Because we probably would be part of Valve at this point.”
