Reflexive Entertainment
From Casual Games Wiki
| Game Development Company |
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 Reflexive Entertainment Founded: 1997 # Employees: 19 full-time, 0 part-time/contract |
Reflexive Entertainment, Inc. was founded in 1997 and is one of the first Casual Games Developers. They were also one of the first Publishers and Distributors in the market as well with their Reflexive Arcade system that launched in 2003.
Games
- Swarm, 1998
- Star Trek: Away Team, 2001 (not casual)
- Zax The Alien Hunter, 2001 (not casual)
- Ricochet Xtreme, 2001 (aka Rebound)
- Lionheart, Legacy of the Crusader, 2003 (not casual)
- Publisher of Crimsonland on the new Reflexive Arcade, 2003
- Ricochet Lost Worlds, 2004
- Wik & The Fable of Souls, 2004
- Ricochet Lost Worlds: Recharged, 2004
- Big Kahuna Reef, 2004
- Big Kahuna Words, 2005
- Wik: Fable of Souls XBox Live Arcade, 2005
- Mosaic: Tomb of Mystery, 2006
- Big Kahuna Reef 2, 2006
- Monarch: The Butterfly King, 2007
History
Reflexive Entertainment has a colorful history rooted in the retail and internet game development environments. What follows is a darkly detailed journey that one doesn't usually find in today's world of marketing double talk and upbeat spinology.
Reflexive Entertainment was founded in Southern California in 1997 by Lars Brubaker, Marlin Eller, James C. Smith, Ion Hardie, Chad Max and Ernie Ramirez. Near the end of 1997, the core group was about to split apart where they had been working at their game jobs at Logicware.
In fact, two members of the group, Ion Hardie and Lars Brubaker, were packing and moving up to San Francisco to get other game jobs. They were roommates, and had been good friends since the 8th grade. Since Ion already had a job at LucasArts, Lars was going to go up there and try his luck. Packing had begun to move out on Friday. Fate, sheer chance...whatever you want to call it happened on the Tuesday three days before moving day. Marlin Eller (Lars' cousin and one of the first 100 people to work at Microsoft) called Lars up and started talking seriously about starting up a game company. They had been joking about it for quite some time, but the talk turned serious, and with not-so-subtle points of "it's decision making time", since they were packing up and moving out in just a matter of days. So, it is with the living room packed and ready to go on a Thursday evening that Marlin came through with "Angel Funding" and Reflexive was born...and Lars was out his U-Haul security deposit.
Reflexive started off working on Swarm, a smaller project that they could release themselves onto the internet. However, 1998 was a bit early for anything that wasn't ultra-casual, so Swarm quickly led them into looking for work-for-hire, where they were able to contact Hasbro and start working on Zax. A year later, Hasbro cancelled all of its external projects, including Zax, at a one time cost to their company of $970 million. Luckily, they had another contract in hand thanks to Lars' contacts in the industry, and the company started working on Star Trek: Away Team for Activision.
In 2000, Ernie Ramirez was wandering the floor of E3, trying to re-sell Zax, since Reflexive had kept the rights to the game, thanks to Hasbro's lack of ever actually signing a contract for Zax. At the end of the day, he almost didn't go to JoWood's booth...he didn't have an appointment, he was exhausted and had been tired of the dog-and-pony show to uninterested executives. However, he decided "what the heck" and went in for what he was sure would be a quick rejection. To his surprise, they picked it up almost immediately.
This all sounds rosy doesn't it...two games in development to large developers, two development teams and the company was already in serious discussions about future projects. However, the current projects were being done at close to cost, and when Activision decided not to go forward with their next Star Trek game due to lackluster performance of the Star Trek brand in general, Reflexive hit a wall.
To scale the wall, they decided to do something completely different. They went back to their roots of game development and, instead of just rushing out and making game demos for every game publisher known to man, they made a game instead.
Ricochet Xtreme was born in this difficult time. As the day quickly approached when Reflexive would run out of money, they worked on Ricochet. James had been working on it on the side with one of the Reflexive artists, and brought it in-house. With Star Trek: Away Team out the door, and Zax in it's final days of development, there was no game contract on the horizon and an uncertain future ahead, but Ricochet was launched. In retrospect, Ricochet Xtreme was one of the first games to be considered casual, as it had reached a level of success rarely seen to that point, and it reached out to many different types of game players.
Ricochet and Zax were released, but there was still a lot of mouths to feed at Reflexive with no contract in hand. With one day before lay offs were to begin, one day, Feargus Urquhart (then at Black Isle studios, and an old friend of Lars') told Lars that they had been playing Zax multiplayer over at their offices and it was a blast. With one day before the team was getting splintered, Feargus said he wanted Reflexive to make an "RPG lite" with fast action and swordplay and he was going to make it happen.
Development went on for two years, and at the end of Lionheart, Reflexive started working on a Dungeons and Dragons game for Atari. Development was going well, and Reflexive staffed up in anticipation of a hard and tight development schedule...same as it had done for years. However, this one happened a bit differently, as Atari cancelled the game on Christmas eve, one day before they would be obligated to start paying on the contract that had been worked out.
Reflexive had to fire half the staff, and keep on about 10 people at severely reduced salaries. How severe? Many people at that point had been making more than 50k a year. Now, everyone, from the CEO to the lowest artist, was given a salary of $10 an hour until things turned around. The most amazing thing was that no one left during this time. With their "feet to the fire", Reflexive went into overdrive, jumping into the casual game market with no safety net, determined to make it work.
And work it did. The year was 2004, arguably the best year that Reflexive has ever had. Ricochet Lost Worlds, Wik & The Fable of Souls, Ricochet Recharged and Big Kahuna Reef were all spawned that year out of a sense of urgency and determination to make the company profitable and to give themselves the greatest thing they felt they could achieve in the business world...financial independance and the ability to control their own destiny.
Since then they have branched out into XBox 360 Live development as well as PC development, and their portal that they manage at Reflexive.com is strong not because of the traffic that their website attracts, but because of the strength of their affiliate network and the thousands of affiliates that they have that source their games directly from the Reflexive Affiliate Program.
