Former Criterion leaders set-up new AAA games studio Fuse Games
The veterans who left Need for Speed developer Criterion in December last year have reunited to form a new AAA studio: Fuse Games.
The new outfit has been founded by studio general manager Matt Webster, head of content Steve Uphill, head of production Pete Lake, head of technology Andrei Shires, and head of operations Alan McDairmant.
The team is in the process of finding an office in Guildford, and will adopt a hybrid working approach. Its first game will be a AAA console and PC release, and when asked if it'll match the games Criterion is famous for – racing titles such as Burnout and Need for Speed – Webster isn't giving anything away.
"Even our recent history spans a few things," Webster reminds us. "Obviously arcade racers and open world racers are what we know very deeply. But we have played around in other genres over the years, including Battlefront, Battlefield… VR. We know what we are good at, and that spans a broad range of things now. Once we select our genre, we want to lead that genre."
The team currently consists of 17 people and the plan is to scale that up, although Webster isn't certain on what that final number will look like.
"We've been fortunate enough to work on games that have spanned the whole gamut," Webster continues. "We know what it's like to have a small group spinning up something new, to have multiple hundreds of people on a huge development. We will end up being somewhere in-between."
"I had a romantic attachment to Electronic Arts and the idea of electronic artists"
When the news broke that Webster and his fellow co-founders were leaving Criterion last year, it came as a surprise to me. Although it's not unusual for people to leave at the end of a project (Criterion launched Need
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