When Newport-based Foundation 9 Entertainment (F9E) picked up Amaze Entertainment in mid-November this year, the company said that the deal “is expected to make Foundation 9 the largest independent game developer in the world.” The firm said that the agreement would bring the total headcount to 725 employees across 11 studios.
The company behind the Death Jr. franchise, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up and Sonic Rivals has its wide-spanning fingers in everything from game development to film production to merchandising.
With several studios and businesses under the F9E umbrella, it’s not merely up to one person to keep everyone in line every minute, or micromanage every little move. But chief creative officer Richard Hare tells Next-Gen that his part in managing the large, multi-faceted developer is more about offering guidance and an outside eye to those who are working eyeballs-deep in a game.
Although F9E studios such as Backbone Entertainment, The Collective and Digital Eclipse are all part of a larger whole, Hare paints a picture of divisions that are quite independent from the F9E overlords.
“Every studio still maintains its own creative identity and initiative towards either creating its own IP or serving the creative vision that we have for each title whether it’s original or whether it’s based on some licensed intellectual property,” Hare says.
“… My feedback is sometimes kind of a sanity check—to throw in some additional thoughts that could potentially strengthen the overall design. So it’s very collaborative in that regard, and it’s something where, given the volume of games that we work on, is something where high level feedback is really of necessity as much as anything else… It works well in that it still gives that breathing room for everyone involved to have their own vision in the game.”
He says that as with pretty much any creative type, whether it be a musician, poet or painter, sometimes the creator falls so much in love with a project that it’s hard—if not impossible—to be completely objective about a piece. Don’t believe it? Just look back in your poetry journal from high school when you were going through your goth phase.
Hare feels he can afford to take more of a hands-off approach in his management style. “The wonderful thing about [all these studios] is the fact that they were all very successful and profitable prior to any integration of Foundation 9. All of them have very strong leaders in terms of studio oversight, in terms of production and in terms of creative direction.”
Shiny happy people
F9E as a company has been in the news fairly frequently because of its rapid growth. Aside from the recent Amaze acquisition, this year, the firm added a new Canadian studio under the Backbone brand, landed a $150 million investment from private equity darlings Francisco Partners and acquired former Atari studio Shiny.
Speaking of Shiny, the house behind the classic Earthworm Jim and MDK (as well as the commercially successful yet critically panned Enter the Matrix) is shaping up nicely under its new owners, according to Hare.
He brims with confidence about the new purchase. “That group is just so tight in terms of their ability to manage the development of their games from a production perspective and from a creative perspective,” he says. “It really kind of makes my role quite exciting. It’s really great. … There are not many positions, I think, that are equivalent to mine where you get to go and interact with so many high-level talented people within an industry.”
Death Jr.: The Flamethrower
It’s not just games that F9E gets involved with. Earlier this year, Next-Gen spoke with F9E CEO Jon Goldman about his company’s adventures into the land of merchandising. Death Jr.