| Type | Game Developer |
|---|---|
| Industry | Interactive entertainment |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Lunenburg, Nova Scotia and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada |
| Key people | Jeremy Wellard - President, Alastair Jarvis - GM, Craig Heffler - CFO, Alan Bunker - COO |
| Products | see below |
| Employees | 110+ |
| Website | www.hb-studios.com |
HB Studios is a video game development company, founded in July 2000 by Jeremy Wellard, and located in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Contents |
HB's headquarters are located in the small town of Lunenburg on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. The company started with nine developers working on Cricket 2002 for EA's Asia Pacific studio.[1] By 2003 and the concurrent development of Rugby 2004 and Cricket 2004 utilizing the Renderware engine HB had grown to 17. Also that year Jeremy Wellard won the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Atlantic Canada.[2]
In 2004 HB signed an exclusive multi-project deal with EA Canada to develop further sports games for the EA Sports label. By the end of 2004 the company had grown to 40 staff. 2005 brought with it a first sports title away from the Rugby and Cricket franchises - FIFA Street 2 on the PSP - which shipped in March 2006 and has subsequently sold over 880,000 units worldwide.[3] HB shipped four titles in 2006 including a co-development with EA Canada on Madden 07, a launch title in North America for the Nintendo Wii.
In the spring of 2007, after the exclusive deal with EA came to an end,[4] the company signed a deal with THQ to develop Big Beach Sports for the Wii. This was HB's first non-EA title and also their first game that wasn't a sports simulation. It sold more than 1.5 million units.[3] By May 2009 only 54 games had sold a million units or more on the Wii.[5] In the late summer of 2007 HB entered a period of deliberate rapid growth in order to be able to take on the extra projects on offer from various publishers. A new studio was opened in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the beginning of January 2008[6] while the HQ in Lunenburg also grew. From September to March 2008 the number of employees at HB Studios doubled from 65 to 130.
In 2009 HB Studios formed a new label, HB Arcade, for self publishing downloadable titles on WiiWare, PSN and Xbox Live Arcade. The first game to ship was HB Arcade Cards on WiiWare in the summer of 2009 with HB Arcade Disc Golf (WiiWare) and Jam Space (DSiWare) following in 2010.[7]
In August 2011 the company released their first self funded full console title - Rugby World Cup 2011 (video game) - on PS3 and Xbox 360 with 505 Games as the publisher. [8] It entered the UK charts at No.3.[9]