The birth and death of Budcat Creations, Iowa's first (and only) Triple-A game studio

gamedeveloper.com:

I moved to Iowa in 2008 to become a graduate student with the goal of earning a doctorate. My first year of this was fine, but I didn’t really find my place. I wouldn’t begin to feel like a member of a community until I got a summer job at the only video game studio in town. Even then, no one knew much about it.

I had only learned of it because I rode the bus with a few employees who worked there. Through casual conversations, I learned that Iowa City was not only home to a game studio, but home to a video game studio that was helping to make Guitar Hero games; at the time, Guitar Hero was one of the most popular video game franchises in the world. This studio was called Budcat Creations.

Budcat was founded in 2000 in Las Vegas but permanently relocated to Iowa City, IA. in 2005. It was purchased by Activision in 2008. Activision then shut it down in 2010. It has been a decade since Budcat’s closure, and I still think about that company. Budcat Creations was the first video game studio I ever worked for. This studio provided me with an opportunity to enter the video game industry and was a community in which I formed long-lasting friendships.

However, I also think of Budcat from another perspective. Budcat Creations uniquely embodies the life cycle of a triple-A development house in some ways and provides insight into essential elements of building a video game studio far from tech hubs in the middle of nowhere. It shows the pros and cons of being acquired by a larger company and the hardships that come when it closes.

So, while the studio is no more, Budcat’s history provides lessons for all interested in entering the video game industry.

With that said, to understand why Budcat was first created, we have to first venture