Leading British Companies

Eidos

Eidos was founded in 1990 as a video compression R&D company. In 1995, Eidos received a cash infusion from an outsider to the videogame industry, Charles Cornwall, a 30-year-old South African who left his job in the City to run Eidos. In 1995, Eidos acquired Domark, Europe's fifth largest developer/publisher, as well as two studios, Simis and Big Red, which developed games for Domark. With the Domark acquisition, Ian Livingstone, a veteran in British game development (including books and board games), joined Eidos, and served as the company's chairman for several years. In 1996, Eidos acquired Center Gold, Britain's largest listed computer games company, along with its two development teams, Core Design and US Gold, and became the owner of Tomb Raider, at that time a title among others, still in development at Core Design. Tomb Raider, published in November 1996 on PlayStation and PC, was an immediate success and triggered a series of lucrative sequels that provided the financial foundation for Eidos' growth in the late 1990s.

Argonaut Software

In 1982, Jez San, then 16 years old, founded Argonaut as a software consultancy firm. During the last half of the 1980s and first half of the 1990s, Argonaut financed itself internally, with funds generated from successful games (e.g., Croc) or from Argonaut's very lucrative technology arm (a subsidiary that had in 1993 produced the powerful "SuperFX" chip for SNES Nintendo console's games). From 1996 to 2000, the company received around 8 million from external partners, two venture capital firms, New Media Investors and Apax Partners, and the Japanese videogame publisher Koei. In 2000, the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange, raising 20 million. San remains the CEO and principal shareholder of the company he founded two decades ago.

Rage Software

In 1991, 11 people from Liverpool formerly with the videogame company, Ocean, pooled their redundancy pay to develop a 3D soccer game called Striker. They formed Rage Software to market the game, and Paul Finnegan, an Ocean co-founder who had worked for other software companies for several years, came on board to manage Rage. Striker was a smash hit, selling 1 million copies in two years. In 1994, Rage was acquired by BCE (Bristol Coin Equipment), a quoted leisure company with interests in amusement arcades and snooker equipment listed on the Unlisted Stock Market (USM). As the focus of BCE's business shifted to computer games, the group took back its name "Rage Software" in 1996. Finnegan still remains the managing director of Rage.

SCi

In 1988 Jane Cavanagh, a former British Telecom employee, founded SCi as a developer and publisher. For six years, the company remained small, employing between 20 and 30 people and publishing a few titles for PCs in Europe. In the mid 1990s, SCi's management recognized that the increased cost of developing videogames and the intense competition to commercialize them meant that it could no longer remain a small publisher. With a profitable track record, SCi became the 200th company listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the London Stock Exchange's market for smaller, growing companies.