Radical Entertainment

Radical Entertainment is a Canadian studio founded in September 1991 by Rory Armes, Dave Davis and Ian Wilkinson in Vancouver's Yaletown district. Armes and Wilkinson had worked at Distinctive Software and used its takeover by Electronic Arts as the moment to start their own company. At first it mainly made ports and adaptations of other games for the NES. After The Divide: Enemies Within (1996), programmer Alex Garden left to found Relic Entertainment, and composer Paul Ruskay left too.

In May 1998 it teamed up with Disney and ESPN to launch ESPN Digital Games, a line of sports games. That same year it went through mass lay-offs, the so-called 'Black Tuesday' of 20 October, after which several staff founded Black Box Games. Its breakthrough came with The Simpsons: Road Rage and Dark Summit, both released in November 2001, and The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003). In 2003 it also opened a division, 369 Interactive, to make CSI games with Ubisoft.

Vivendi bought the studio in 2005, though it kept working largely on its own terms. Under the Sierra label it released Scarface: The World Is Yours (2006) and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and it took over the Crash Bandicoot series with Crash Tag Team Racing, Crash of the Titans and Crash: Mind over Mutant. In 2008 Vivendi Games merged with Activision, which took over the studio, laid off half the team and cancelled two unannounced projects. Prototype came out in 2009.

After another round of cuts in 2010, Prototype 2 (2012) was the best-selling game of its release month in the United States, yet Activision saw it as a commercial failure. In June 2012 it announced major staff cuts: Radical would stop making its own games and only support other Activision studios. Its latest credits are the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Prototype and Prototype 2 (2015). It was among the studios in Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard, but the small team that remained now works under the Activision Vancouver name.