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Company Background
Rage Software went into liquidation following the withdrawl of its manufacturing credit
facility by its bankers. At the time of liquidation, it was one of the oldest games companies in the UK. It began life as a games developer, creating games for third party publishers and received critical acclaim
and considerable commercial success with its Striker football game. In the late 90s, the Company extracted itself from an unsuccessful merger with arcade and snooker company, BCE and Nintendo developers, Software Creations and focused itself on games development.
Given the high levels of interest its titles in development seemed to be creating in 98/99, the Company then decided to make the move into publishing and proposed to self finance and publish all of its PSX and
PC titles that hadn't already been signed up to third party publishers. This strategy, however, failed to produce the expected returns and the Company began to vary its model, on a title by title basis, between
developer/publisher and 3rd party developer (for publishers such as Sony, Hasbro, Microsoft and Infogrames). This then moved back to a 100% self-publishing model with third party distributors and publishers employed
for continental Europe and the USA. At the time of its liquidation in January 2003, the Company employed around 160 staff in offices around the UK (Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol and Warrington). The majority of
these were in development.
Rage secured, in June 01, an equity line of credit from US group GEM Global Yield Fund of £15m and used around £4m. The GEM ELOC was secured in parallel with a £6.2m credit
facility with the Bank of Scotland. Rage raised around £5m of new money via a deep discounted placing and open offer in June 2002.
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