Longtime Marin County video game studio Toys for Bob closes office, lays off 86

A video game development studio that has been a key part of a local cluster of businesses over the past three decades will no longer have a Marin County address as the reverberations of Microsoft’s record $68.7 billion acquisition resound through the industry.

The Toys for Bob studio continues to work on game series such as “Crash Bandicoot,” “Spyro” and “Skylanders,” but its offices at 4 Hamilton Landing in Novato are closing this quarter and 86 employees are being let go, according to a notice sent to the state Jan. 25 and reporting from gaming industry publications.

Those jobs are among roughly 1,900 cuts Microsoft announced internally two weeks ago for Activision Blizzard and its own Xbox group, amounting to 8% of its gaming division, tech publication The Verge reported. In what’s considered the largest acquisition ever for the U.S. high-technology sector, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant completed its purchase of Activision Blizzard in November after two years in progress.

Layoffs for 899 Activision Blizzard jobs in California are set to take effect March 30, state notices said.

Some jobs Activision Blizzard game studios are going to remote work. Sledgehammer Games, where 76 jobs are being cut, is taking that route after the Foster City office closes, Insider Gaming reported. A similar shift of Toys for Bob jobs to remote work happened for “a majority of staff,” reported Seasoned Gaming.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on how many of the Sledgehammer and Toys for Bob employees are now working remotely.

The shift from physical game development locations doesn’t surprise Fred Ford, 62, who co-founded Toys for Bob and largely remained at the helm with Paul Reiche III, also 62, until the end of 2020.

“It was trending that way, but COVID pushed it over the cliff,” Ford said Feb. 8.

Like many businesses deemed “nonessential” by public-health orders put into place in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, all but a few game companies quickly shifted to remote work.

GDC, producer of annual game developer conferences, noted in its report in January of this year that “remote work has always been a part of the game industry.” By early 2022, nearly one-third of developers surveyed by GDC said they were still working totally remotely for a company with a physical office, 29% had a hybrid schedule in the office and elsewhere and 11% were working remotely because the office was abandoned. The 2023 survey showed a similar mix of work environments.

This year, 26% of GDC’s survey respondents said they were being forced to go back to the office five days a week (5%) or on a hybrid basis (21%), while 58% said they had no policy.

Remote work wasn’t easy when Ford and Reiche started working together in the late 1980s on contract for game publishers. Personal computers at the time were suitcase-sized, the internet was in its public infancy, and data-storage devices were difficult to move around. That hampered file-sharing between collaborators and especially publishers. That’s how Toys for Bob came to be based in Marin, where the founders live.

“Our goal was never to make a company but to continue our careers in making games,” Ford said.

Ford and Reiche released the “Star Control” game on the MS-DOS operating system in 1990. But as personal computers became faster and more capable of intricate graphics, Ford the software engineer and Reiche the designer-artist as they worked on “Star Control II” realized they needed to bring in more help. By the mid-1990s the studio’s workforce had swelled to 30 for a project but settled to between 10 to 20 by 2000, increasing year by year after that.

In 2002, Toys for Bob incorporated and shortly thereafter started making some games for Activision, which in 2005 acquired the studio for an undisclosed price.

The studio’s second breakthrough came in 2011 with the first release of the “Skylanders” series, and it worked on it through 2016. After the 2020 release of the fourth sequel to “Crash Bandicoot,” Ford and Reiche left Toys for Bob to revisit “The Ur-Quan Masters” open source game they released in 2002. Studio employment had reached 180 at that time, trade publication Game Rant reported.

This promo video from the studio in 2019 shows what it looked like at the time:

Toys for Bob in 2021 started taking on parts of development for Activision Blizzard’s hugely popular “Call of Duty” series.

For the past four years, Ford and Reiche have been working with a few other developers under the name Pistol Shrimp Games. A tool that allows gamers to build their own titles is set to be released later this year, Ford said.

“After a long career for me, I’m interested in giving back to the industry,” Ford said. “We have no plans to move out of Novato anytime soon.”

Marin County has been home to string of game development companies over the years, according to Ford and reports in industry publications. Brøderbund came to Marin in the early 1980s from Oregon and was dissolved in 1998 after its acquisition from what’s now SoftKey. Lucasfilm Games started as LucasArts Entertainment in San Rafael in 1982 then moved to San Francisco’s Presidio with other Lucas companies in 2005.

Former LucasArts employees started Telltale Games in San Rafael in 2004. It grew via its adaptation of “The Walking Dead” graphic novel to a peak of about 400 employees in 2017, when the company started restructuring and closed in 2018. LCG Entertainment in Malibu acquired the assets and continues to operate it there.

Another Marin game development company with LucasArts roots was nStigate Games. It started in Novato in 1998 as Nihilistic Software and reorganized in 2012 as nStigate to focus on mobile and digital games. It shut down later that year.

Visual Concepts Entertainment started in Novato in 1988, was acquired by Sega in 1999 then by Take-Two Interactive in 2005. Visual Concepts lives on as the 2K studio based at Hamilton Landing, and in 2019 spawned the local spinoff studio Cloud Chamber.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.