Sega Studios San Francisco
Secret Level was a company in the area of computer games in San Francisco. It was bought in 2006 for its technological and technical success of Sega America, restructured due to commercial failures of the subsequently developed products, however, first to Sega Studios San Francisco and later closed.
History
Origins and business area
The company was founded in late 1999 in San Francisco and was originally located in the immediate vicinity of Powell and Market Street, later moved to the vicinity of the AT & T Park. His greatest strength lay personnel ( after integration into Sega ) at 200 employees.
Before buying by Sega Secret Level was a small independent studio, your own video games such as Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds developed, foreign titles such as Star Wars: Starfighter, America's Army: Rise of a Soldier and Unreal Tournament ported. Secret Level was also working on a port of Final Fight: Streetwise and Karaoke Revolution on the Xbox.
Secret Level has also created numerous tools and technologies for the console game industry in collaboration with LucasArts, Sony, and others.
Acquisition by Sega
Secret Level was, during the development of Golden Axe in early 2006: Bought Beast Rider for Sega, Sega. Simon Jeffery, the former CEO of Sega of America, was inspired by Secret Levels project progress and technology and pointed at Sega America to buy the studio.
After the takeover, Secret Level has grown from a small founding companies to a large studio with nearly 200 employees. Within two years of growth, Iron Man (computer game) and Golden Axe were: Beast Rider for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Some voices in the art assessed this as a point too early.
Iron Man & Golden Axe
According to Metacritic, a website that compiles video game reviews, scored the PlayStation 3 version of Iron Man in criticizing an average rating of 42 ( out of 100), the Xbox 360 version was 45th in the rating scale of Metacritic mean average scores below 50 " generally unfavorable reviews. " Secret Level did not develop the games to cinema new releases of Iron Man for Nintendo DS, Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and Windows. These developments were instead awarded to the studio Artificial Mind.
The Secret -level porting Beast Rider received by IGN a rating of 3.2 out of 10 points with the final remark "This game deserves to be shunned like the plague, even if we have the classics from the bottom of my heart in your memory. " GamePro called it " technically poorly developed and extremely mediocre, " " a terrible game that feels for the fans of the original like a slap in the face. " TeamXbox gave the game 6.8 points. High School Ben, the editor of ScrewAttack.com, the sister site of GameTrailers, wrote " Throw it in the trash " because of " strange " operation, the lack of music and high level of difficulty X-Play on G4TV gave the game in his review of 22. October2008 only 2 out of 5 stars.
For the game spoke a rating of 9 out of 10 of Play Magazine. Play also wrote, " some online critics " were " not able " have been playing through the game in the set time frame and " deliver a decent criticism."
Sega Studios San Francisco
After the failure of both games with the critics and the market Sega Secret Level wound up and kept a few hand-picked staff to reincorporate the studio under the name Sega Studios San Francisco. The new studio did not have the independence of the old, as Sega contributed all of its business decisions directly.
Sega wanted to reach through the restructuring with Iron Man 2 and the successor of Beast Rider the success that had been expected from the original games. On 2 April 2010, however, Sega announced plans to close Sega Studios San Francisco with the release of Iron Man 2. Sega did not release the successor to Beast Rider, what different websites to think prompted that the quality of the game did not meet the expectations.
The CEO of Sega West, Mike Hayes, said in an interview with 1UP.com through the settlement of the studio: 1UP: Secret Level has been closed to digital because of the trends?
MH: The decision was made on a broader basis. We are happy with Iron Man 2, on which they have worked, but the truth is that we could not find another suitable project for them. You may remember that we did the same with our race [ game ] studio here in London three years ago. It was a good team, but we could not find a new project for them.