TWO POINT STUDIOS

How a new studio rose from the ashes of Lionhead success not simulated

- LEWIS PACKWOOD

Mark Webley, co-founder of Two Point Studios, is clear: "It was Gary's brainchild, really." Webley and Gary Carr had worked together on Theme Hospital at Bullfrog Productions in the 1990s, and both had gone on to roles at Lionhead, working on games including Fable and The Movies. By 2013, however, Webley had become disillusioned following Lionhead's change of focus under new owner Microsoft, which saw the studio put to work on Kinect games and live-service productions.

"I'd kind of had enough of games," he recalls, "because I had nothing to do with making games any more. It was just an exec job." Webley quit the industry, while Carr found himself in charge of an incubation department within Lionhead. "I had a little team of no more than about eight people trying to come up with new IP for Microsoft," Carr recalls.

"But that was almost impossible because in the 14 years we were there, there was never any new IP. It was always Fable, Gears Of War, Forza and Halo, so what were the chances of my team coming up with something they were prepared to greenlight?" Carr had, at least, built up a strong group, including Ben Hymers, "a really smart tech guy" who was a fan of the sim genre, and of Theme Hospital in particular.

"So I had a chat with him quietly," Carr remembers, "and I said, "If I was to go and speak to Mark and we were to spin up a little studio, would you be interested?" And he said yes." Carr approached Webley with the idea of forming Two Point Studios and making a kind of homage to Theme Hospital, a Bullfrog hit in 1997.

Webley recalls being sceptical: "I said, 'Who's going to be interested in a 20-year-old game?"" However, he was fond of his time working with Carr on the original game, which the pair had originally planned to follow with something built around the same concept but set in a holiday resort or a prison. However, EA, which had bought Bullfrog by this point, had other ideas.