Rebellion Plots Its Boldest Development Yet

After 27 years in games, comics and books, Rebellion plots its boldest development yet

- Nathan Brown

We’ve been on a few studio tours in our time, but we have never seen anything quite like this. Rebellion’s new digs are spread across multiple cavernous buildings, a former printing press spanning 220,000 square feet, sat on a 12.5 acre plot. A walking tour takes half an hour and, we’re assured, barely scratches the surface. When Rebellion CEO and co-founder Jason Kingsley visited it for the third time, he went off on his own, poking around. “I was like a child going to a new house,” he tells us, “charging around like a lunatic, looking for dens and stuff like that. It was filthy, but it was absolutely brilliant. It felt like I was urban exploring – except we own it.”

Kingsley describes Rebellion, which he co-founded in Oxford in 1992 with his brother Chris, as a sort of “accidental company”. Still privately owned, it has been run, and has prospered, for almost 30 years on a sort of ad-hoc basis. There is always a plan, of course, but the brothers rarely think more than three or four years into the future, and many of the most critical decisions they have made have been about what felt right at the time. The latest of those choices might be the biggest yet, and this sprawling studio-to-be is the proof of it. Rebellion is going to the movies.