In October 1999 Edge went to Guildford and found an industry hiding in a Surrey commuter town. “Nowhere else in the UK will you find 300 game developers working in such close proximity,” it reported. The developers ate at neighbouring tables in lunchtime restaurants, shared a mailing list and a football league, borrowed each other’s sound studios, and poached each other’s staff. They were there, Edge said, “largely here because of the biggest frog in the pond, Bullfrog”. A decade later the magazine went back and called the town the Abbey Road of British games. The studios have changed owners and names many times since, but the pattern has held: a team leaves a Guildford company and starts another one down the road.
Fast facts
- Where: Guildford, Surrey, about 30 miles south-west of London.
- Started with: Bullfrog Productions, formed in Guildford in 1987 by Peter Molyneux, who was born in the town, and Les Edgar.
- Size in 1999: about 300 developers, by Edge’s count.
- Bullfrog’s offshoots: Lionhead Studios (1997–2016), Mucky Foot, Lost Toys, and Lionhead’s own satellite studios.
- The other anchor: Criterion, a Canon company making the RenderWare engine and games, owned by Electronic Arts since 2004.
- Later studios: Media Molecule (2006), Hello Games (2008), Supermassive Games, Fireproof, 22cans (2012), and Codemasters’ Guildford studio.
Bullfrog and the break-up
The cluster began with one company. Molyneux and Edgar formed Bullfrog in Guildford in 1987, and Populous (1989) made it famous. Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper followed, all published by Electronic Arts. The Bullfrog entry tells that story.
EA bought Bullfrog in 1995, and the staff scattered. Edge set out the sequence in 1999: “Since Molyneux and Edgar sold out to Electronic Arts 1995, nearly all of the Bullfrog originals have hopped off to start their own companies — including their former bosses. Molyneux founded Lionhead after finishing off Dungeon Keeper in his house, and a clutch of his senior generals promptly jumped ship to found Mucky Foot.”
Mucky Foot, whose directors included Gary Carr, Mike Diskett and Fin McGechie, made Urban Chaos and Startopia. Glenn Corpes, Jeremy Longley and Darran Thomas founded Lost Toys, with Les Edgar as a business angel. Lionhead, founded in 1997 by Molyneux, Mark Webley, Tim Rance and Steve Jackson, did not grow into one big studio. By 2001 it had instead a “satellite strategy” of small linked companies around it: Big Blue Box, where Simon and Dene Carter were building the game that became Fable, Intrepid, and Black & White Studios.
What the town looked like in 1999
Edge’s 1999 feature is the best picture of the cluster at its first peak. Each studio got a fact box with its staff count, its favourite pub and its number of “Guildford natives”; Bullfrog, then 160 people on Guildford Business Park, reported “a few, but unknown”. The magazine found the studios running as a loose federation. “We all pretty much help each other out,” said Mucky Foot’s Gary Carr. “We cross-reference potential staff and CVs with Lionhead, and we’ve used their sound studios, too.” Developers traded news on the “GGD”, the Guildford Game Developer email list, and fielded teams in a football league: Lost Toys, Bullfrog, Criterion, EA Studios and “LionFoot”, a joint Lionhead and Mucky Foot side.
Big Blue Box’s Simon Carter explained why they helped each other. “Talent breeds more talent. Mucky Foot, Lionhead and the others, we all have talent and we need to bring newcomers into the industry. If it’s all kept in one place then no one learns anything.” He also pointed out the risk of putting so much of the industry in one small town: “The single biggest blow you could make to the games industry in this country would be to throw a grenade into Tesco at lunchtime.”
It was not all friendship. “Mucky Foot, in particular, revels in its bad-boy image,” Edge noted, and its staff boasted about the people they had tempted away from Bullfrog. Edge summed it up: “All the Bullfrog break-offs are rooting for each other.”
Criterion and EA
Not every Guildford studio came from Bullfrog. Criterion, part of the Japanese camera and electronics company Canon, sold the RenderWare 3D engine to other developers and made games of its own. Edge described it in 1996 as “funded by the deep pockets of Canon”, and in 1999 as “slap bang in the middle of town”, with more developers than any Guildford company except Bullfrog. Its Burnout racing games began in 2001. In 2004 Electronic Arts bought Criterion, and with it RenderWare, which Grand Theft Auto, Tony Hawk’s and Pro Evolution Soccer were all built with. From 2010 Criterion made Need for Speed games for EA.
Bullfrog itself left Guildford. In 2000 it moved to EA’s new offices in Chertsey, and in 2001 it was merged into EA UK. EA came back to Guildford later. By 2010 its glass-and-steel building in the town housed both Criterion and EA Bright Light, which made the Harry Potter games. “EA is the reason a lot of the games industry is in Guildford,” Bright Light’s Harvey Elliott told Edge. “If you go back to the beginning, we bought Bullfrog in 1995.” EA did not want to revive the old name: “We didn’t feel like we should go back to being Bullfrog, so the name Bright Light was born.” EA closed Bright Light in November 2011, after the last Harry Potter game, and some of its staff moved to Criterion and to Supermassive.
The second wave
In 2006 four former Lionhead staff, Mark Healey, Alex Evans, Kareem Ettouney and David Smith, founded Media Molecule in Guildford. When Edge saw its first game in 2007, the studio had fewer than 20 people. That game became LittleBigPlanet (2008), a PlayStation 3 platformer whose players built and shared their own levels, and Sony bought the studio in 2010. Siobhan Reddy told Edge that year that the founders, from Lionhead and Bullfrog, had brought “the ‘Peter’ effect” with them: Molyneux “really encouraged experimentation and creativity”. She had come from Criterion herself.
Criterion’s people started studios too. Sean Murray, who had worked at Criterion on Burnout 3 and Black, founded Hello Games in 2008 with Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Ream. Its first game was the stunt racer Joe Danger (2010). No Man’s Sky (2016) was a space exploration game with a procedurally generated universe. After Burnout Paradise the Criterion artists who founded Fireproof resigned together to keep their team going, first as an art studio working for other developers. One of them put the town’s character down to its origins: “Lionhead, Media Molecule — these studios’ attitudes are traced back to our days at Bullfrog, when we didn’t care about anything except how good the games were.”
Newcomers arrived as well. Supermassive Games was set up by Pete Samuels, formerly of EA, and in 2010 was making Move Party for Sony’s new motion controller. Codemasters opened a studio in the town. When Edge gathered the heads of Guildford’s studios in 2010, EA’s Harvey Elliott said “it’s not often in the UK you get big pockets of development like this”. Asked where ideas crossed between the companies, Media Molecule’s Alex Evans answered: “At the pub. You can’t talk about the details of your project but you can one-up each other. It’s friendly competitiveness.” In 2012 Molyneux left Lionhead and Microsoft to found 22cans, in offices less than a minute’s walk away.
After 2016
Microsoft closed Lionhead in April 2016, after cancelling Fable Legends. Mark Webley and Gary Carr, who had worked together at Bullfrog and Lionhead, then co-founded Two Point Studios, whose Two Point Hospital (2018) was a spiritual successor to Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital.
The newer studios had mixed fortunes. Supermassive made Until Dawn (2015), The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry (2022), was bought by the Danish company Nordisk Games in 2022, and cut about 90 jobs in 2024. Media Molecule released Tearaway (2013) and Dreams (2020), ended live support for Dreams in 2023, and lost its founders one by one. Hello Games “took a lot of flak” for No Man’s Sky at launch, as Wireframe put it, and kept updating it for years; Wireframe’s reviewer found that the 2018 Next update “finally shows its potential”. The studio announced Light No Fire in 2023. Criterion stopped making racing games and in 2025 renamed itself “Criterion – A Battlefield Studio”. Molyneux’s 22cans released Masters of Albion on early access in April 2026, a god game in the line that began with Populous in the same town 37 years earlier.
Sources
- Edge, issue 19, April 1995: Criterion advertisement for RenderWare, with a Guildford telephone number and a canon.co.uk address.
- Edge, issue 30, March 1996: Molyneux profile, Bullfrog formed 1987.
- Edge, issue 36, September 1996, contents: Criterion “funded by the deep pockets of Canon”.
- PC Gamer (UK), issue 55, April 1998: advertisement, “Criterion Studios is a division of Criterion Software Ltd., a Canon Company”.
- Edge, issue 76, October 1999, “Silicon Valley, UK”, from p. 74: 300 developers; “the biggest frog in the pond”; the departures from Bullfrog; Criterion “slap bang in the middle of town”; the fact boxes; Gary Carr, Simon Carter and the Tesco remark; the GGD list and the football league; Mucky Foot’s “bad-boy image”; “rooting for each other”.
- Edge, issue 93, January 2001: Mucky Foot and its directors.
- Edge, issue 101, September 2001: Lionhead’s satellite strategy (Big Blue Box, Intrepid, Black & White Studios); Lost Toys and Les Edgar.
- Edge, issue 107, February 2002: Lost Toys’ founders.
- Edge, issue 141, October 2004: EA’s takeover of Criterion and RenderWare.
- Edge, issue 174, April 2007: Media Molecule’s first game, made in Guildford by fewer than 20 people.
- Edge, issue 216, July 2010, “Region Specific: Guildford”, pp. 120–143: the Abbey Road comparison; Bullfrog established 1987; EA Bright Light and Criterion’s shared building; Harvey Elliott on EA and Bullfrog; Supermassive and Pete Samuels; Media Molecule’s founders and Siobhan Reddy; Codemasters Guildford; Fireproof; the studio heads’ round table.
- Edge, issue 243, August 2012: 22cans and its offices near Lionhead.
- Edge, issue 246, November 2012: Sony’s purchase of Media Molecule in 2010; Hello Games in Guildford.
- Edge, issue 263, February 2014: No Man’s Sky preview; Sean Murray’s work at Criterion on Burnout 3 and Black before founding Hello Games.
- PC Zone, issue 89, May 2000: Bullfrog’s move to Chertsey.
- Wireframe, issue 1, November 2018: review of No Man’s Sky Next.
- Wireframe, issue 45, November 2020: No Man’s Sky after launch, “Hello Games took a lot of flak”.
- “Report: EA shuts down Bright Light”, Game Developer, 5 January 2012 (web, secondary): closure in November 2011; staff moving to Criterion and Supermassive. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-ea-shuts-down-bright-light
- “Bullfrog Productions”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): merger into EA UK in 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions
- “Criterion Games”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the Burnout games from 2001; the Need for Speed games from 2010; the 2025 renaming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_Games
- “Media Molecule”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): founding in 2006; Sony’s purchase; Tearaway, Dreams; the end of Dreams live support and the founders’ departures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Molecule
- “Hello Games”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): founding in 2008 and its founders; Joe Danger; No Man’s Sky; Light No Fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Games
- “Supermassive Games”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Quarry; Nordisk Games; the 2024 job cuts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_Games
- “Lionhead Studios”, Wikipedia, and “Microsoft shutting down Lionhead Studios”, Game Developer, March 2016 (web, secondary): the closure. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/microsoft-shutting-down-lionhead-studios-confirms-i-fable-legends-i-is-cancelled
- “Two Point Studios”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): founders and Two Point Hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Point_Studios
- “Peter Molyneux’s Masters of Albion launches into Early Access next week”, TheSixthAxis, 17 April 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2026/04/17/peter-molyneuxs-masters-of-albion-launches-into-early-access-next-week/