Pandemic Studios

Pandemic Studios was an American developer based in Los Angeles. It was set up in 1998 by two Activision alumni, Josh Resnick as president and Andrew Goldman as chief executive, who brought along most of the team behind Battlezone and Dark Reign: The Future of War. Activision took an equity stake in the new studio. Out of roughly six possible names, Seismic among them, the founders settled on Pandemic. Its first two games were sequels for Activision: Battlezone II (1999) and Dark Reign 2 (2000).

In 2000 it opened a second studio in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Australia, which started with Army Men: RTS (2002), a console real-time strategy game on the Dark Reign 2 engine, and went on to make Destroy All Humans! (2005). In 2003 the Los Angeles team moved from Santa Monica to a high-rise in Westwood. Its in-house engine, Zero, first used for Battlezone II, powered Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2002) and the Star Wars: Battlefront series, which began in 2004, the same year as Full Spectrum Warrior.

In November 2005 Pandemic joined forces with Canada's BioWare, backed by the private equity fund Elevation Partners; both kept their own brands under VG Holding Corp. That period produced Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (2005), which added Havok physics to the Zero engine, and Destroy All Humans! 2 (2006). On 11 October 2007 Electronic Arts announced it would buy VG Holding, effective from January 2008. Under EA came Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (2008), built on a new engine, and The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (2009).

EA shut the Brisbane office in February 2009 and, as part of job cuts across several studios, confirmed on 17 November that year that Pandemic was closing, with 228 layoffs. Its last game was The Saboteur (2009), set in the French Resistance during the Second World War. EA Los Angeles kept 35 staff to support it and to work on Mercs Inc, a follow-up to Mercenaries. A Batman: The Dark Knight game and Mercenaries 3 were among the cancelled projects. Former staff went on to 343 Industries, Infinity Ward, Treyarch and Respawn Entertainment.