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Company Background
Warthog is a games development company that was founded in 1997. The core of the
development team comprise ex-Electronic Arts personnel responsible for, amongst titles, the hit Privateer: The Darkening. With this as the basis, Warthog began to develop something of a speciality in space
flight sims with follow-up titles Starlancer (which sold over 330,000 units, mainly on PC) and Star Trek Invasion (achieving over 230,000 units on PlayStation). Since 1999, the Company has also
developed expertise in children's titles, with releases including Tom & Jerry, Loony Tunes, Harry Potter and Asterix.
The Company has already worked with a variety of international publishsers
including Microsoft, Activision and Infogrames and is currently developing new titles for SCi and EA. In late 2003, following the failure of a number of its smaller publisher partners, the Company began to refocus
its development strategy towards large third party IP and US development, away from UK and original IP development.
The Company raised £4.3m (net of expenses) when it floated on AIM in February 2001,
£2.1m in January 2002 and £4.15m (net of expenses) in February 2004. This follows a number of private rounds (since 1997) totalling £300,000.
The Company currently employs 120 people and is based in Cheadle, near
Manchester with studios in Sweden and the USA.
The games assets and subsidiaries of Warthog PLC were sold to US electronics manufacturer Tiger Telematics in November 2004. Coverage cease from this point on.
Activities
Following restructuring in 2003 and 2004, Warthog has 4 development teams at its main Cheadle
headquarters and at:
42-Bit: Swedish developer acquired in early 2002, working on Richard Burns Rally
Fever Pitch: US studio that began working on an unannounced project for
Vivendi Universal Games. The project was cancelled in early 2004. Fever Pitch was acquired in 2003.
Key Titles:
Richard Burns Rally
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