Ubisoft Reflections' Partnership House head office in Newcastle upon Tyne
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Subsidiary | |
Industry | Computer and video game industry |
Founded | 1984 |
Founder | Martin Edmondson |
Headquarters | Newcastle upon Tyne, England |
Key people
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Richard Blenkinsop (Managing director) |
Products |
Driver series Just Dance series Destruction Derby series Shadow of the Beast |
Owner | Ubisoft |
Number of employees
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200+ |
Parent | Ubisoft |
Website | reflections |
Ubisoft Reflections Ltd. (formerly Reflections Interactive Ltd.), is a British video game developer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. The studio focuses on racing games and it is best known for creating the award winning Driver series.
Martin Edmondson started developing games for the BBC Micro with Nicholas Chamberlain in 1984. Their first game was a Paperboy clone called Paper-Round that took two years to develop but was never released. While working on that game, they started Ravenskull which would be their first published game, released in 1986 by Superior Software. This was followed by Codename: Droid and an Acorn Electron conversion of Stryker's Run in 1987.
The name Reflections was first used for their 1989 hit Amiga game, Shadow of the Beast, published by Psygnosis which spawned two sequels. The original Amiga game was partially written by Paul Howarth, and started out life as a parallax test of the blitter of the Amiga's Agnus chip; Paul later went on to work for Deep Red Games, a UK video game company based in Milton Keynes. A number of other Amiga and Atari ST games followed including Ballistix (1989), Awesome (1990) and Brian the Lion (1994).
In 1995, they became known for Destruction Derby, which was critically acclaimed for its realistic physics and destruction, which later become Reflections' specialty. Due to the success, the game had four more sequels over the years. In 1999, Reflections became well known for the game Driver, which was inspired by '70s cop shows like Starsky and Hutch and movies like Bullitt and The Driver. It has been followed by four sequels and four spin-offs. The company incorporated as Ever 1016 Ltd. on 14 April 1998, and changed its name to Reflections Interactive Ltd. on 22 May 1998.