The Top Ten Video Game Facilities in the Industry
Players see the finished game, but rarely the place where it was made. Behind the biggest franchises sit offices, campuses and converted industrial buildings that say a lot about the companies inside them. Some are monuments to a studio's history, others are designed purely to keep hundreds of developers productive and happy through long production cycles. Here is our pick of the ten most impressive video game facilities.
The landmarks
Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine. Few studios announce themselves as loudly as Blizzard. The campus is famous for the enormous orc warrior statue standing in its courtyard, a pilgrimage spot for fans of Warcraft and a clear statement that the company is proud of its worlds.
Ubisoft Montreal. Housed in a vast former textile factory in the Mile End district, the studio turned an industrial relic into one of the largest game development hubs anywhere. The brick, high ceilings and open floors give the teams behind Assassin's Creed room to grow.
Nintendo, Kyoto. Understated and white, Nintendo's headquarters is the opposite of flashy, which suits a company that lets its games do the talking.
Built for creators
Valve, Bellevue. Valve's offices are known for desks on wheels, allowing staff to roll their workstations to whichever project they join. The layout reflects the company's flat structure.
Bungie, Bellevue. Bungie converted a former cinema into its home, with plenty of space for the testing labs, audio rooms and motion capture work behind Halo and its successors.
Naughty Dog, Santa Monica. A compact but highly focused studio, with an in-house setup for performance capture that shaped the cinematic feel of Uncharted.
Rockstar North, Edinburgh. The home of Grand Theft Auto keeps a low public profile, but its facilities are built around the huge open-world production pipeline the series demands.
The new wave
Epic Games, Cary. Epic's campus in North Carolina is purpose-built, with large open work areas and space for the engine teams whose technology powers games across the industry.
CD Projekt RED, Warsaw. The Polish studio's base in the Praga district grew alongside The Witcher series and has become a symbol of the rise of Eastern European development.
Insomniac Games, Burbank. Insomniac has long been praised as a great place to work, and its offices are designed with collaboration and comfort in mind.
Why the building matters
A studio is more than a workplace. Good facilities attract talent, encourage teams to share ideas and make the long months of crunch more bearable. As budgets and team sizes keep growing, the buildings behind our favourite games will only become more ambitious.