DAMBUSTER STUDIOS

How the former Free Radical found the fun amid corporate crises

- JEREMY PEEL

Free Radical Design’s final project was its 2008 office Christmas party. Not that the majority of its staff were aware. “The guys who ran the company knew it was in serious trouble,” Dambuster technical art director Dan Evans-Lawes remembers. “They were like, ‘Well, we’ve paid for the party anyway, so we might as well go out with a bang’. Everyone had a great time.”

A few days later, the staff arrived at work in Nottingham to find a locked door and a sign directing them to a nearby hotel. There, they were met by bankruptcy administrators, who divided the developers into two rooms. “It was pretty brutal,” Evans-Lawes says. “If you went into one room, you got the chop, and if you went into the other room, you got kept on.” Ultimately, only 40 employees made the cut.

Dambuster design director Adam Duckett was one of those who got the chop. In the following February, however, he received a call: German powerhouse Crytek had bought the studio. “Suddenly, everyone’s phone was ringing.” Many of the laid-off staff returned. But in the six weeks that had passed since Christmas, others had already uprooted their lives to start jobs at studios in Canada, the US and Singapore. “That was the first big loss of talent in one go,” Duckett says. “When we came back in, my focus was more lasered in on the work we were doing. You have to prove yourself again.”