Boss Key Productions, Inc. was an American

video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a larg ...

based in

Raleigh, North Carolina Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the South ...

. Founded in April 2014 by Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee, formerly of

Epic Games Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, ...

, the company developed '' LawBreakers'' (2017) and ''Radical Heights'' (2018), both of which were commercial failures, effectively leading to the closure of the development team in May 2018.

History

Cliffy B and Boss Key at GDC 2016 (25846174186)

Boss Key Productions was founded by former

employees Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee, in

, on April 30, 2014. The studio's inception and name were officially revealed on July 4, 2014, with Bleszinski and Brussee helming the establishment as

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

and

chief operating officer A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the " C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...

, respectively. Boss Key Productions' first project was '' LawBreakers'', a

first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the pl ...

for Microsoft Windows and

PlayStation 4 The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013 in ...

. Although ''LawBreakers'' was received positively following its August 2017 release, it underperformed commercially, leading the team to move on to develop a battle royale game instead of supporting ''LawBreakers'' in the long term. Subsequently, Brussee left Boss Key Productions in December 2017, announcing that he had returned to Epic Games to work on an "exciting secret project". The battle royale game, titled ''Radical Heights'', was released in April 2018 as a

Steam Early Access Early access, also known as alpha access, alpha founding, paid alpha, or game preview, is a funding model in the video game industry by which consumers can purchase and play a game in the various pre-release development cycles, such as pre-alp ...

title, officially dubbed "X-Treme Early Access". The game was received negatively by some critics, due to its very early state, and described as a mere " cash-in" in the light of the popularity of other battle royale games, such as ''

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds ''PUBG: Battlegrounds'' (previously known as ''PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds'') is a battle royale game developed by PUBG Studios and published by Krafton. The game, which was inspired by the Japanese film '' Battle Royale'' (2000), is bas ...

'' and ''

Fortnite Battle Royale ''Fortnite Battle Royale'' is a free-to-play battle royale video game developed and published by Epic Games. It is a companion game to '' Fortnite: Save the World'', a cooperative survival game with construction elements. It was initially r ...

''. On May 14, 2018, following the overall under-performance of both ''LawBreakers'' and ''Radical Heights'', Bleszinski announced via

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that Boss Key Productions had shut down. The studio previously had 65 employees as of September 2017. According to Bleszinski, he did not take a salary for two years in order to pay for his employees so they "could care for their families." Following the success of the 2014 game '' Alien: Isolation'', Boss Key had been in discussions with

20th Century Fox 20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film studio, film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm o ...

to make a

game set in the '' Alien'' franchise, where the player would play as

Newt A newt is a salamander in the subfamily Pleurodelinae. The terrestrial juvenile phase is called an eft. Unlike other members of the family Salamandridae, newts are semiaquatic, alternating between aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Not all aqua ...

, guided by

Ripley Ripley may refer to: People and characters * Ripley (name) * ''Ripley'', the test mannequin aboard the first International Space Station space station Dragon 2 space test flight Crew Dragon Demo-1 * Ellen Ripley, a fictional character from the Ali ...

, as she fought through xenomorphs in Earth-based labs where they were being studied by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, in a style similar to ''

Half-Life Half-life (symbol ) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable at ...

'' series. However, the project had been shelved as a result of the merger of Fox into Disney.

References

External links

{{Cliff Bleszinski 2014 establishments in North Carolina 2018 disestablishments in North Carolina Companies based in Raleigh, North Carolina Defunct companies based in North Carolina Defunct video game companies of the United States Video game companies disestablished in 2018 Video game companies established in 2014 Video game development companies