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Company Background
Argonaut is one of the oldest games companies in the UK, having been founded in 1982 by Jez
San, the current CEO. Argonaut, under San, has produced some 11 AAA-selling (250,000+) titles, three of which, Croc I/II, StarFox and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone have each sold over 3m
units. Argonaut, over the years, has developed a reputation for technically innovative titles some of which even made use of internally developed hardware designs too. Indeed, this technical innovation was
encouraged and a separate hardware company, ARC Cores was demerged from Argonaut in 1998 and is now listed on London's main market.
Until 1996, the Company was financed from internally generated funds. Since
then, it has received around £6m of external investment and raised an additional £18m when it floated in April 2000.
Argonaut remains a fiercely independent development company that has tried to focus on the
upper segment of the games development market,stating that it will deal with top 5 publishers only and tyically working on above-average budget projects. Since flotation, the Company has begun a hitherto
unsuccessful policy of self-funding its own titles in order to both retain the IPR on the properties it creates and to attain more favourable royalty rates from publishers (for whom the publishing risk is reduced).
Argonaut has 268 employees (around 85-90% of which are actual developers) and is based in North London with additional studios in Oxford, Cambridge and Sheffield. During 2001, Argonaut bought two small
development studios: Just Add Monsters and LTStudios. Argonaut added to this in Jan 2002 with the acquisition of Particle Systems (in a deal worth up to £4.1m) and mobile developer Morpheme in August 2002 (in a deal
worth up to £1.9m).
Argonaut went into administration in October 2004.
Activities
Argonaut's internal studios have been responsible for over 28 titles including StarFox (3m+ units sold), Stunt Race FX (900k units), Harry Potter (4m units to date) Croc (2.2m units) and Croc 2 (950k units). The Company currently has 4 products in development including Catwoman for EA which is being developed by around 120 staff and represents the biggest project undertaken by Argonaut to date.
LTStudios: Independent development studio working on the PS2 version of Malice. 100% owned by Argonaut.
Just Add Monsters: Cambridge-based developer behind Kunf-Fu Party. 100% owned by Argonaut.
Particle Systems: Sheffield-based Sci-Fi games specialists, 100% owned by Argonaut. Creators of the I-War series currently finishing off Powerdrome.
Morpheme:
Mobile games developer.
Key Titles
Catwoman
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