So, imagine the surprise of the stakeholders when Human Head Studios closed a day after Rune II came out, only to be replaced by Roundhouse Studios under Bethesda. Human Head Studios had a deal with publisher Ragnorok, LLC, apparently, to release the game and then support Rune II with post-launch content. The next twist in the tale of Human Head Studios road to Roundhouse Studios was still to come.Ī sequel to Rune, called Rune II, of course, was released in 2019 on November 12th. Human Head developed Survived By (2018), an " online bullet-hell style roguelite" which only arrived on PC. It was a beat 'em up with full FMV sequences, but it was appallingly reviewed and currently holds a 28 on Metacritic on PS4. In 2018, the team released The Quiet Man on PS4 and Windows. The next 'major' release was Dungeon Defenders II on PS4 in 2015 as a development partnership between Human Head and Trendy Entertainment. Later there were mobile games like Fort Courage (2012), Minimum (2014) for Atari on Windows, and Lost Within (2015). Prey 2 went back to Bethesda three-quarters finished, and Human Head could go on developing whatever it wanted having not released a game of its own for six years. It did, with Bethesda allegedly continuing to put in offers for the studio along the way, believing that it put it "into a corner," so Human Head refused and stopped development on the game. To keep afloat, Human Head helped work on Defiance (2013) and Bioshock: Infinite (2013) until the agreement for its sole development of Prey 2 expired. In response, it seems that Bethesda started retracting Prey 2 funding based on 'missed' development milestones, something reiterated by the inside sources, until Human Head agreed to be acquired. Human Head, allegedly, did not want to sell up. However, sources from within Human Head suggested that Bethesda started playing "hardball" by trying to buy the studio, which couldn't stay comfortably afloat without the publishers' investment in the project. An IGN exposé by Mitch Dyer in 2013 suggests that the success of the trailer lent Human Head an extra six months of development on Prey 2, which was very nearly finished. However, all was not well behind the scenes. Prey 2 had a gameplay demo at E3 in 2011 after developing the title for a few years. So, why such a long gap between the beloved Prey in 2006 and working on Brink as a support studio in 2011? The infamous Prey 2 debacle, that's what. The FPS trend continued with some support work on Splash Damage's Brink (2011), a parkour-focused action-arcade multiplayer shooter. The sci-fi FPS really caught the imagination of gamers with wild uses of gravity and portals, becoming one of those long-running third-party Xbox exclusives that players on the green box could point to with pride. While the team had been making Blair Witch Volume II: The Legend of Coffin Rock (2000), Rune (2000), Rune spin-offs (2000-2001), and later Dead Man's Hand (2004) for the original Xbox, it is Prey (2006) that put the marker in the ground for Human Head as a dev team to look out for on Xbox. Human Head, the development team led by Chris Rhinehart, had been around since 1997. On the very same day, Roundhouse Studios was born under the Zenimax portfolio in one of the strangest industry moves ever seen, and one that left legal trouble in its wake. A day later, on November 13th, Human Head closed its doors. The Human Head team published Rune II on November 12th, 2019. Human Head and Roundhouse have the exact same staff and are in the exact same office. Roundhouse was formed in 2019 under the Bethesda Game Studios label after being reformed from a developer called Human Head Studios.
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