No More Heroes

Slingshot Cartel is turning its back on music titles – and plans to change how games are made.

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Freestyle Games is no more. The studio behind DJ Hero and Guitar Hero Live lives on, albeit scaled down, under new ownership and the name of Ubisoft Leamington. That deal only went through in January, by which time it had already been a year since co-founders Jamie Jackson and Dave Osbourn had decided it was time to walk away. Activision, then Freestyle’s owner, put the studio through a restructure, cutting headcount and having those who remained support development of other Activision titles, rather than making their own. Freestyle’s Guitar Hero Live had sold in excess of two million units. It wasn’t enough.

“For me and Dave to stay there didn’t make an awful lot of sense,” Jackson explains. “We were too top-heavy for something that wasn’t making games by itself any more. You don’t need a creative director, you don’t need a design director. It wasn’t sensible for the studio to carry our salaries, I guess.”

So Jackson and Osbourn – along with Freestyle’s art director Gareth Morrison, plus studio manager Jonathan Napier – decided to strike out on their own, starting up new venture Slingshot Cartel, with a mandate to do things differently. But there’s no bitterness at how their Freestyle story came to an end. Instead, it’s the driving force behind how this ambitious new company intends to function.