Singularity Games

Singularity Games is an American video game developer based at a large campus in Redwood City, California, United States. The studio's main focus according to press releases is to develop new intellectual properties.

They are also contractually assist in development of various games. Their clients in this case include EA, Activision Blizzard, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Take-Two Interactive.

History
Singularity Games was founded as Laserium Holdings' equivalent to Electronic Arts' divisions All Play/Maxis, SEED and Worldwide Studios. The studio, along with Roblox Consumer Products and Laserium Game Studios Cheltenham, were purchased by Dreamcatcher Entertainment in December 2017, shortly after Laserium Holdings' assets were acquired and merged into Old Dominion Media. RCP and LGS Cheltenham would eventually become the New York and UK studios respectively. Most of the staff from there would eventually move to the Redwood City studio.

They announced to work on numerous AAA games, two mobile titles and a seventh undisclosed project in January 2018. One of the four AAA titles were announced as Cosa Nostra, and another one was announced to be published by SEGA. Two more AAA projects were announced at PAX South, as Yip and Skylar.

The JRPG-like Moving Mountains, the previously undisclosed seventh project, was announced in E3 2018. Also in E3 2018, Singularity Games announced a partnership with DeNA, a mobile games company.

There are talks of opening up a studio in Liverpool to employ ex-Bizzare Creations and SCE Studio Liverpool employees.

Acquisitions
In January 1, 2018, Singularity Games acquired some staff and the video game development, animation, visual effects, art and creative production operations of Salovaara & Kukkonen Group. They also acquired Laserium Game Studios in Moscow, Sydney, Torotno, Chicago, Austin, Manchester, Vancouver, Paris, Halifax, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Hamburg, Riverside, Dublin and Annecy, with all of their projects in development or pre-production. They also acquired Laserium Game Studios' pinball and mobile divisions, Game Agent's Los Angeles game development studio, MPS Labs, CedarMaple Australia, Live Interactive's office in Sydney and its studios Adrenium Monsoon (Toronto) and Black Ship Games (London).

In April 2018, the Cheltenham studio acquired staff from Dambuster Studios, Fishlabs, Crytek, Techland, Virtuos, Exient Entertainment, Rockstar Studios, Feral Interactive, Nixxes Software, Chimera Entertainment, CGBot, Rmory, The Imaginarium Studios, Turbulent, voidALPHA, Wyrmbyte, FaceWare Technologies, IllFonic, Wushu Studios, Hyperion Entertainment, Creative Assembly, Splash Damage, Sumo Digital, King Digital Entertainment, Playdemic, TT Fusion and TT Animation. They also hired a few people who worked on Sailfish OS to help with porting, while acquiring Starbreeze UK from Starbreeze Studios, the Warsaw development studio from Ubisoft and staff from Gameloft.

The Redwood City studio, in the meantime, acquired staff from King, Massive Black, Mercenary Technology, Gameloft, inXile Entertainment and WB Games, while the New York studio hired staff from OtherSide Entertainment, Harebrained Schemes and King.

Singularity Games acquired Dan Wicker's anime studio Denime KK, which would later be turned into the Tokyo satellite studio for animation, and later on, game development.

On April 27, 2018, Singularity Games Cheltenham completed the acquisition of development studios in Chertsey and Vienna from Ubisoft and by 2018, Singularity and its predecessors acquired studios in Valencia, Hyderabad, Helsinki, Guadalarja, Chengdu, Santiago, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, New York, Milan, Stockholm, Jogyakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Auckland, New Orleans, Seattle, Tokyo, Hanoi, Da Nang, Shenzen and Madrid from Gameloft, with nine game developers: nSpace, Handheld Games, Shaba Games, RedOctane, Luxoflux, Budcat Creations, Underground Development, the 3DO Company and Edge of Reality.

In May 2018, Singularity Games announced to open a satellite studio/temporary development studio in Vancouver, with staff from Bandai Namco, Behaviour Interactive, Valve Corporation, Digital Eel, Raven Software, Digital Extremes, Virtuos, Capcom, Gearbox Studio Quebec, Rockstar Studios, Piranha Games and Techland; another one in Austin, with staff from Triptych Games, Gearbox Software, Aspyr Media, Glu Mobile and Certain Affinity; and another one in Tokyo, with staff from Arika, Crafts & Meister, DotGears, XPEC Entertainment, Bandai Namco, Gameloft, Sparx Animation Studios & Virtuos, Arzest, Studio Khara, Aniplex, Studio Trigger, Intercept and DiNG, ArtPlay, Racjin, Konami and Bandai Namco. These studios were set up to contribute to the development of Mirage, and also hire students from nearby universities (and sometimes select, if they are a great distance from the studios).

In June 2018, they acqui-hired Team UltraTurbo (a racing game development team), Cloudsauce (a cloud computing company) and Solid Pirate Ninjas (a puzzle game developer), all based in California. The brands were discontinued after employees were transferred completely into the Redwood City studio.

In July 2018, Singularity Games completed work on Mirage and merged the New York, Austin, Vancouver and Tokyo studios into the Redwood City studios. Also staff was moved from the Cheltenham studio to Redwood City studio once again; this time it was over 99% of the staff, leaving only 5 game developers.

The "Guardian Angel" story
One day at the offices, Jane Schwarz invited Peter Smith (now Peter Smith-Schwarz) to discuss about lack of work. She found out the cause of it, which was constant abuse from his family and friends, which caused him to go into depression. She decided to take him in temporarily until everything went into a better direction. Eleven months later, Schwarz and Smith got married. This story was spread around the news and it was received positively.

Redwood City
Nicknamed "Singularity Game City", the campus consists of a motion-capture studio, twenty-two rooms for composing, fourteen video editing suites, three production studios, numerous departments with their own wings, and hotel-like apartment complexes for the employees hired from abroad. There are also facilities such as fitness rooms, theatres, coffee bars, a soccer field, a garden, and several arcades, one of them is even open to the public.

The place also has a ball pit room, a restaurant and numerous other "fun rooms", for employing people outside of the video game industry. The whole campus utilizes great amounts of bioenergy, mainly solar, wind, biogas and hydrostorage power, and next to the campus, there are planted numerous trees in a maze-like patttern. The campus is targeting to use the least amount of electricity and lower their carbon footprint as much as possible.

There is an inside joke among partners and co-developers about Singularity Games being "EA but better", due to similarity in campuses and work environment.

Corporate affairs
Due to amount of employees, there are three basic rules about working at Singularity Games, inspired by such companies as Valve and X (formerly Google X): They also have some employees working remotely.
 * 1) "If you want to work on a project with friends, feel free to do so" This was implemented in order to boost productivity.
 * 2) "If you don't first succeed, make something out of it"
 * 3) "Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark" Singularity Games also encourages interacting with other development teams and testing out assets before they're put in the game.

Cheltenham
In July 2018, shortly after the merger, between the New York studio and most of Cheltenham studio, into the Redwood City studio, the now-former headquarters were shut down. The studio now resides in an "average-sized open office space".

Singularity Boost
Singularity Boost is a crowdsourcing program, open to anyone residing outside the United States and Japan, allowing gaming enthusiasts who want to get into the games development / designing industry to submit their unique ideas to Singularity Games (the Redwood City studio, to be exact) which could then be developed into games. They allow remote working for volunteer developers and auditioners.

In addition, 25% of the proceeds, from the sales of games who pass the audition, will go to charity, usually gaming-focused charities such as Special Effect and Child's Play. The other 25% will go to the teams who develop them and the rest will be kept by the pitchers, with a chance of working with them on future projects.

For ideas in Japan, they assist PlayStation C.A.M.P. in development of the games.

Known development teams
Singularity Games hosts blogs for inner development teams of specific projects.

Virtual Arcade Men
The team specializes on developing minigames and "80s arcade-ish" video games to be played inside Singularity Games' projects. This team only exists as a temporary unit for when games need to include easter eggs (in this case, arcade cabinets) in order to make the gameplay more fun. They aren't signed to develop any original games outside of the Singularity Game Jam.

Iris Force
This team specializes on original handheld games.

Omixron
This team specializes in free-to-play games.

Awero Studio
This team develops Moving Mountains, a JRPG-like adventure game. Led by Airi Suzume.

Singularity Game Jam
Every year, for two months, there is a game jam where people take time off development of current projects and work on minigames according to themes. In 2018, the first Game Jam was about nostalgic atmosphere, so teams had to make SNES-like games.

The contending games are published on Singularity Games' website and, for consoles, marketplaces like Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, and the winning game will be developed into a full-fledged version.

2018

 * Timejumpers (Microsoft Windows) - Two junior scientists create a time machine, and few months later, they are testing it in front of the public. However, chaos will ensue and everyone's lives will be in danger.
 * Jurioku (Android) - Gravity-based adventure, with ability to scratch to change object's visibility. The project was going to be developed for PS Vita, but failed.
 * Quest to Something (Microsoft Windows) - You are on a quest to rescue the princess, but you need a lot of loot. A lot. Like you need a big inventory.
 * The Slaughter Factory (Microsoft Windows) - A short horror game based around a remote island, with an abandoned factory. There are a lot of secrets about that factory and the island and you need to find out all of them.
 * Incognito (Xbox One) - A spy adventure game where the player works for a secret agency. Your mission is to spy on people, but you might not know if people are spying on you as well.
 * ALTRNTIVE, a "32-bitish" platformer demo which features time machine elements (like cloning), gravity switching, "portals similiar to those from Portal" and many other experiments.
 * SUPROCTO, a open world action game specializing on "2-player, 3-player and even 4-player" action, where you use various items to fight the "zombie robot octopus of hell".
 * MNDCNTRL, a demo which specialized on "alternative physics", gesture recognition, special effects and other experiments.

Virtual Arcade Men games

 * Quest to Everything: A Collect-a-thon Game (1991) - Complete opposite of the game. Just collect everything, screw the princess.
 * Old Ultra Human Platformer 16 (1996) - Have you ever thought what platformers would look like in the paralell universe?
 * Just Another Day in the Good Old Alternative Universe (2000)
 * Destroyer (1986)
 * Destroyer 3D (1997) - The "third" installment in the Destroyer series.

Cancelled

 * Bionic Wars (cancelled - original release date unknown; PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows) - The game's plot was revealed to include mechanical combat and stealth elements, to be set in Dubai during 2080s, and was to be a cinematic science fiction-action game.

Trivia

 * Frantic Mayhem Royale franchise used to be owned by Crytek and the first game was made by Free Radical Design, now Crytek UK) and was acquired from Crytek around 4 years after Crytek UK was closed.

Easter eggs
Like Kojima Productions for example, Singularity Games also does publicity stunts, easter eggs and more, regarding their games, staff and even their games' characters.
 * While announcing Moving Mountains in E3 2018, Singularity Games developers wore T-shirts that read "0011 0011", which is number three in binary. This was later confirmed as a nod to the fact that Half-Life 3 wasn't released. It was also a homage to the Illuminati conspiracy theories on the Internet. Coincidentally, the release date for Moving Mountains was announced to be 3th of March, 2019.
 * There are numerous easter eggs related to Virtual Arcade Men team. For example, in the title screen of Destroyer, there's a copyright notice "© V A ? ?????? MCMLXXXVI" (which translates to "© VAM Russia MCMLXXXVI (1986)"), meaning "it was made in Russia in 1986", when it was actually made by Singularity Games Redwood City in 2018. The references are made in every game and the year when the minigame was "made" was said to be always from around 10 years to 35 years older than the actual game.
 * In the VAM game Quest to Everything 2, the Singularity Games staff can be seen in many buildings and dungeons.