How the Pinewood Studios of videogames carved itself a wider niche
There’s rarely a dull moment at Sumo Digital, but the Sheffield-based developer is perhaps busier now than it’s ever been. Having recently appointed Ian Livingstone CBE as its non-executive chairman, it’s in the process of opening a new studio in Nottingham. It’s planning to hire 50 additional staff for the new venture, as well as an additional 50 for its remote office in Pune, India. There is, too, the small matter of developing Crackdown 3; running an internal game jam; producing downloadable content and post-launch support for LittleBigPlanet 3; and continuing its work with the Disney Infinity series. And there’s more. Upon our arrival, we learn, with Yager having been relieved of its duties, that Sumo will now be making Dead Island 2. It’s a studio in exceptional health and determined to prove its agility: in the circumstances, you wonder whether Sumo is really the right name any more.
The company’s founders may have plenty to occupy them, but there’s something else they’re particularly determined to address. The general public impression of Sumo is that it’s primarily a racing-game studio. The likes of LittleBigPlanet may have done something to shift that perception in recent years, but it’s keen to no longer be pigeonholed as such. “Lots of people in the studio love making racing games,” co-founder and COO Paul Porter tells us, “but lots of people hate making them, and like making firstperson shooters or thirdperson shooters or platformers. So it was an objective of ours to be more diverse in the types of work that we did.”
A more undesirable perception is that Sumo is a work-for-hire studio, which dramatically undersells its involvement with well-known publishers and recognisable series. Creative director Sean Millard shakes his head: “It’s a terrible [tag],” he says. “Work for hire suggests that we’re given work based on a specification,” CEO and co-founder Carl Cavers adds. “We don’t get given a specification. We get handed a brand. We define what that world is going to be going forward and then agree that with the client. And then we own that, and the client represents it. And that’s why, when we talk about the organisations we work with, we talk in terms of being a partnership. It’s not ‘them and us’ – we get each other through that process.”
Sumo takes its responsibilities to the publishers it works with very seriously indeed. It’s partly why it has earned such a strong reputation within the industry. Having worked at Gremlin Interactive and then Infogrames Sheffield, Sumo’s directors were naturally accustomed to dealing with large organisations, and that experience has served them well ever since. “We offered something different in terms of our service than what [publishers] were used to,” Cavers explains. “I think that’s because we very much understood and were aligned with what they were trying to achieve. At the time, there was a barrier between development and publishing and [some] developers didn’t value publishing at all. We came into it and said we really understand publishing – we know how difficult it is.” Since then it has worked with many of the biggest names in the business: Sega, Microsoft, Sony, Activision, Electronic Arts, Konami, Disney and the BBC. “Ian Livingstone said the other day that essentially we’re the Pinewood Studios of videogames,” Cavers says. “We’re the go-to studio for getting triple-A videogames done.”
Which isn’t to say that it’s always the publisher doing the chasing. Sumo’s involvement with Disney Infinity, for example, came about thanks to a fortuitous meeting between Disney Interactive’s VP of production John Vignocchi and Millard at GDC. “He kind of cornered me and I kind of cornered him,” Millard laughs. “I was buzzing about Disney Infinity and wanted to talk to him as a bit of a fanboy, really. But it turned out he wanted to talk to us as a bit of a fanboy of all our work with Sega, especially the racing stuff.” The subsequent conversation became rather animated: Millard was critical of the original game’s driving model, and Vignocchi expressed his desire to improve it. Here was a round peg and a round hole, and Sumo was quickly brought on board to refine the driving element of the third game in the series. Such was the increase in quality that Toy Box Speedway was developed into its own subgame and released as premium DLC.
If that deal was a no-brainer, the same can’t be said for Sumo’s involvement with Dead Island 2. In July of last year, publisher Deep Silver revealed that Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager would no longer be developing the game, with Yager citing creative differences for the split. Dr Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of the publisher’s parent company Koch Media, invited Cavers and Porter to a conference call to discuss the project. Within a week, several key staff from Sumo had flown out to Germany to meet Koch, and outlined what they would do with the game should they be given the job of resurrecting it. “We were so much on the same page with what their ambitions were creatively that we all gelled around that table,” Millard recalls. “It was a brilliant meeting. We all got really excited by each other and started talking about the cornerstones of the game that we wanted to [implement], not only to differentiate it from the competition but to push the franchise forward.”
Though that initial conversation was productive, Sumo realised it still had something to prove. “And rightly so, I think,” Cavers adds. “They had to know that we were the right partner for that game. It wasn’t a case of, ‘Oh, Sumo are a safe pair of hands – we know they can do it.’ It was, ‘We need to knock this game out of the park.’” After a long and drawn-out process, Sumo got the job, with Koch admitting that the studio’s evident enthusiasm was one of the reasons that made its offer so attractive. “We wanted it badly enough to fly out to Germany and basically demand a meeting about it,” Millard says, “and that resonated with them, and has continued to do so throughout the last six months. We’ve instilled that confidence in them, and that’s great, because to me that’s Sumo [in a nutshell]. If we want something enough we’ll go out and get it, and we’ll ram everything out of the way to achieve that.”
As much as Sumo wanted to impress Koch and Deep Silver, Dead Island 2 represents a landmark opportunity for the studio to prove to itself and to a wider audience that it’s more than capable of diversifying. “I’ve been in every [business development] meeting we’ve ever had, trying to push us out of this corner of driving games that we’d painted ourselves into,” Millard says. “So when we get an opportunity like this, I’m all over it. Along with Crackdown 3, it’s defining the fact we can do anything. I think it’s going to be looked at as a really important moment.” Indeed, it says much for Sumo’s selfconfidence that it isn’t merely thinking of this as a one-off. “We didn’t look at this as just needing work,” Cavers explains. “We didn’t need work! But we wanted the project. We really, really want to work on this game, and we want to become the developer for this game going forward. That’s the approach we’ve taken.”
We suggest that perhaps Sumo’s reputation within the industry isn’t reflected by its status in the eyes of the wider gaming audience. “It’s a very valid observation,” Cavers admits. “Essentially we’ve been a business-to-business organisation, and we’re in the process of migrating, to some extent, towards business-to-consumer.” Not that fans aren’t already keen to communicate more directly: Sega fans will badger Sumo to make another Sonic racing game or another OutRun, believing it has the power to make that happen. “It’s very flattering,” Cavers says.
Indeed, studio director and co-founder Darren Mills is keen to highlight the studio’s active efforts to increase awareness of its brand, ensuring it becomes known for everything it’s good at, not just as a specialist in a single genre. “Since we went independent last year, we’ve rebranded and we’ve got a new website,” he explains. “We’ve finally got rid of that 12-yearold horrible corporate site and got something that people want to look at and tells people who we are and what we do. It’s up to date, we tweet, we go on Facebook, and we do all that sort of stuff that historically we’ve been terrified to do.”
Or that it hasn’t had time to. Sumo had been considering an internal game jam for some time, but Millard admits it was reticent to go ahead with the idea until it found the time and resources to do it right, citing its “belt-and-braces” approach to new initiatives. But that changed after a conversation with Ian Livingstone, who convinced Sumo simply to do it. The results were a revelation: the winning entry, a physics-puzzler with the working name Snake Simulator, was the product of a lone staff member, and will likely see the light of day later this year. It encouraged Sumo to invest more resources in another jam, which took place in late February. This time, entrants were invited to work collaboratively to produce even better results. “What’s been interesting is the people who’ve been delivering these ideas aren’t necessarily the people you’d expect,” Millard tells us. “Like someone who’s usually really quiet on a team, and they’re delivering these brilliant ideas, so you think, ‘Shit, why didn’t you speak up earlier?’ And it’s good to know – whether or not the games go forward, you start understanding a little bit more about what makes all these people tick creatively.”
It’s just one of a number of steps Sumo is taking to broaden its horizons, the new Nottingham studio being a case in point. With its Sheffield base predominantly concerned with those ongoing collaborations with big publishers, this represents an opportunity to branch out and try new things without interfering with the core business. “If we tried to do that in Sheffield,” Cavers explains, “there’s a danger of magpie syndrome, where everyone wants to get involved because it’s a new shiny thing.” Nottingham is the ideal location: close enough to manage, distant enough to not become a distraction, and with plenty of industry connections in the area. Again, it stems from Sumo’s desire to escape its niche – though Millard believes that it’s already found another. “I think our niche is our versatility,” he says. “We’ll do a first-class driving game, then we’ll move onto something like LBP3, which is a first-class creative platformer. We’ll go back to things like Forza [Horizon 2] and we’ll leap forward with something like Crackdown 3. That’s what we’ve got that no one else has got. And that’s important.”