It’s not all fun and games at Irvine video game developer Ready at Dawn Studios LLC.
But it sure looks like it.
Workers zip around its new 17,000-square-foot office on Razor scooters.
Shorts, flip-flops and hooded sweatshirts are the uniform of choice.
The kitchen is stocked with heaps of candy, chips and snacks.
There’s a living room area with big, comfy couches, a wide-screen flat-panel TV, a lava lamp and every gaming gadget in existence.
The company credo includes a line about embracing game developers’ “child-like nature”: “At Ready at Dawn, we are so much in touch with our ‘inner child’ that at times we have trouble locating our ‘outer adult,'” the company said on its Web site.
It might be a video game fan’s paradise,but serious business and plenty of hard work happens at the company.
Ready at Dawn’s some 35 workers whip up code and create original characters and landscapes and then animate them. Others do sound engineering. Some test and refine each pixel within their imaginary worlds. It’s a process that takes years to get right.
The company has carved out a tidy little niche in Orange County as one of the few local makers of video games for consoles, which hook up to TVs, and handheld devices.
There are a few other console game makers here, including Newport Beach’s Foundation 9 Entertainment Inc., which last year combined two local acquisitions,Shiny Entertainment Studios of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach’s Collective Inc.,into its headquarters.
There’s also Newport Beach’s InXile Entertainment Corp., which has made games for Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360, Nintendo Corp.’s Wii and its handheld player, DS.
Since it was started in 2003, Ready at Dawn has made two games for Sony’s PlayStation Portable, a handheld game player, and one for the Wii. The games sell for about $40.
Making video games for consoles connected to TVs is an entirely different animal from making ones for handheld devices, according cofounder and President Didier Malenfant.
“The handhelds have kind of been the poor stepchild of console game development,” he said. “It was expected from everybody that games didn’t need to be as good on a handheld and so they weren’t for a long time. But we’ve been trying to turn that around and show that it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Shared History
Ready at Dawn shares some history with online video game maker Blizzard Entertain-ment Inc. in Irvine, now part of Vivendi SA’s Activision Blizzard Inc.
Founders Malenfant, Ru Weerasuriya and Andrea Pessino all were senior programmers at Blizzard, which is best known for its blockbuster role-playing game series “World of Warcraft,” where millions of players face off on the Internet.
Malenfant hails from France, Weerasuriya from Switzerland and Pessino from Italy.
The programmers didn’t leave Blizzard “to show the world how we could do it way better than our previous employers,” Malenfant said. “There was an opportunity there. We know how to make console games and there were no really good console games being made in OC.”
Ready at Dawn’s first title “Daxter” is a spinoff of Santa Monica-based Naughty Dog Inc.’s series “Jak and Daxter.”
Malenfant worked at Naughty Dog, which is owned by Sony, for four years before starting Ready at Dawn.
The company has kept up its strong ties with the folks at Blizzard, Naughty Dog and Sony, he said.
“That doesn’t happen very often but it allowed ‘Daxter’ to happen,” Malenfant said. “They were really cheering for us.”
Daxter,Jak’s half otter, half weasel sidekick,was a big success. It’s sold some 2.3 million copies, according to Malenfant.
“It had huge sales and a very good critical reception,” Malenfant said. “It was a perfect story as far as we were concerned, because it really helped put us on the map.”
Target Audience
The company did a complete turnaround on its second release, “God of War: Chains of Olympus.”
It’s a violent, Greek mythology-themed game for PlayStation Portable that has received industry awards for its high-level graphics and complex animation.
It, too, was a spinoff of the first “God of War” game put out by Sony.
“‘Daxter’ was super fuzzy and happy,almost a kiddie game,” Malenfant said. “‘God of War’ was super mature, super violent. That was a conscious decision in a lot of ways to challenge ourselves and not get pigeon-holed and show that we have a lot of range.”
Games geared toward teens and adults make up a large market for a company such as Ready at Dawn.
“That’s the irony when people talk about video games as only being for kids,” Malenfant said. “The majority of the people who play the games aren’t kids. There’s a big segment that caters to teens and 20-plus.”
“God of War,” which was released in March, is on track to sell more than 2 million copies.
Privately held Ready at Dawn doesn’t disclose sales. It typically gets an advance up front from a publisher to develop a game. After the game’s released, it then collects royalties from sales and licensing deals.
Ready at Dawn’s most recent title, also released in March, is an adaptation for the Wii of a Japanese cult classic fantasy game, called “Okami,” which originally was published by Capcom Entertainment Inc. for PlayStation 2.
“Okami” takes place in a mythical world that looks like the interior of a Japanese watercolor painting.
“It’s an adventure game kind but the story is very Japanese,” Malenfant said. “It’s something that a Western developer would not come up with.”
Players use brush strokes to launch attacks. The moves were controlled by the PlayStation 2 joystick and Ready at Dawn had to adapt the program to work with the wand-like controller of the Wii.
“It wasn’t necessarily a project that we needed to do,” Malenfant said. “It wasn’t a strategic decision or anything like that. It was just pure passion.”
