‘We just tried to make what we thought was cool': the story of Monolith Productions

The Guardian

18-03-2025

Late last month, Warner Bros announced it was closing three of its game development studios in a 'strategic change of direction': WB Games San Diego, Player First Studios, and Monolith Productions. At a time when the games industry is racked with layoffs and studio closures, the barrage of dispiriting headlines can be numbing. But the shutdown of Monolith cut through the noise, sparking fresh shock and outrage at the industry's slash and burn approach to cost cutting. There are numerous reasons for this, but among them was a pervading belief that Monolith would be around forever. 'I don't think I ever really considered the possibility that it would shut down one day,' says Garrett Price, one of Monolith's seven founding members.
True to its name, Monolith was a singular presence. Founded in 1994, it was a prolific developer whose games displayed visual flair, mechanical inventiveness and a knack for synthesising pop-cultural themes. Most excitingly, you could never really predict what the studio would do next. While it primarily produced first-person shooters, there were forays into platformers, dungeon crawlers and open-world games. And even the core FPS titles differed wildly in theme and style, inspired by everything from 60s spy films to Japanese horror.
'Monolith didn't really have a true identity, and we honestly didn't really care,' Price explains. 'We pretty much just made whatever we wanted to make… We didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what genre would sell the best or what theme would be the most accessible to the mass market. We just tried to make what we thought was cool.'
Monolith emerged from the edutainment software company Edmark, where several of the company's founders were previously employed. 'On my interview day, I remember this bald chap walking past me on the stairs wearing a Wolfenstein 3D T-shirt. I figured this would be a great place to work,' says Toby Gladwell, Monolith co-founder and software engineer. He recalls that his co-founders were emboldened by the recent release of Doom, the demonic first-person shooter that catapulted its creators, id Software, to rockstar status and transformed perceptions of the PC as a gaming platform. 'We realised quickly that this was our calling. We simply had to make the best games of all time.'
However, Monolith's initial project bore little resemblance to id Software's classic. Claw was a 2D, Mario-style platformer about a pirate cat. It was meant to be Monolith's debut title, but in a quirk of fate, the company acquired another developer in late 1996 – Q Studios – which was deep into production on a Doom-like first-person shooter called Blood. Monolith opted to prioritise Blood's completion over Claw – a decision that would have huge ramifications.
Released in March 1997, Blood puts players in the role of Caleb, a gunslinging servant to the demon Tchernobog who is is betrayed and murdered by his fiendish master. 'Those early games, especially Blood and Claw, have a very hand-crafted feel to them and were very much DIY endeavours,' Price says. A 2.5D shooter released as games were pivoting hard into full 3D rendering, Blood was in some ways behind the times. But its gritty visual style, creative weapons such as flare guns and voodoo dolls, and innovative addition of alternate fire modes for weapons, helped it stand toe-to-toe with more technologically advanced games such as Quake.
The success of Blood sent Monolith into a frenzy of FPS development. Between 1998 and 2003, it designed seven new games in the genre including Blood 2; the anime-inspired shooter Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, which alternated between on-foot combat and city-flattening battles inside Gundam-style mechs; and two licensed tie-in games, Aliens Versus Predator 2, and Tron 2.0.
'Our studio culture was born from a deep-seated conviction that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to,' Gladwell says. 'We talked games, we played games together, both competitively and to analyse. There weren't significant boundaries, given that we were all new to building a company – other than a strong desire to build games that would stand alongside the giants of the time.'
The lack of boundaries also applied to the practical side of game design. 'This was still a fledgling industry when we got started. The more specific roles you see today, such as world builder or environment artist were far more nebulous. Everyone pitched in. This helped give us a broader spread of opinion and feedback, because everyone was contributing to design,' Gladwell says. 'Much of my own time at Monolith was spent in the energy vortex between design, art, audio and engineering.'
The brightest star of Monolith's early years, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, or NOLF as it is affectionately known, saw players don the orange catsuit of Cate Archer in a gloriously colourful pastiche of 60s espionage fiction. Its wide-ranging adventure transported players to Morocco, Germany, the tropics and even into space, with each level introducing new ideas, weapons and gadgets. Released in 2000, It was also one of the only shooters of its time with a female protagonist – and her portrayal holds up surprisingly well for a game that owes a significant debt to Austin Powers.
Monolith's vintage year, however, came in 2005, during which it released three games. Alongside The Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer adaptation of the 1999 sci-fi action movie, Monolith released a second game partly inspired by the same film: Fear. The culmination of Monolith's mastery of the FPS, Fear combines the espionage themes of NOLF, the stylised ultraviolence of Blood and the Japanese borrowings of Shogo – though this time it looked to J-horror films, particularly Ringu, for inspiration. It bound these elements together with dynamic slow-motion combat and state-of-the-art enemy AI design, pitching the player against an army of clones that could seemingly work together tactically to outfox the player. The result is one of the best first-person shooters ever made.
Fear is arguably Monolith's best game. Yet despite its title, it isn't the scariest. One month after Fear launched, Monolith released Condemned: Criminal Origins. A dark and gritty detective thriller inspired by films such as Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, Condemned likewise blended horror and battles against eerily human enemies. But the foes you face in Condemned are crazed vagrants who attack the player with steel pipes and wooden planks, these tooth-and-nail duels interspersed with grisly crime-scene investigations.
By far Monolith's most unsettling game, Condemned's atmosphere of dread is thicker and more convincing than anything in Fear. A level set in a mannequin-filled department store has become infamous for its paranoia-inducing qualities. 'Their studio had a real talent for permanently altering your imagination by turning everyday locations into memorable levels,' says Cameron Martin, senior producer at New Blood Interactive, publisher of retro shooters including Dusk, partly inspired by Monolith's work. 'After playing their games, you'll never look at empty office buildings or crusty subway stations the same way again.'
Fear and Condemned would be the last truly original games the studio would make. By 2005, Monolith had been acquired by Warner Bros, and after providing Fear and Condemned with decent if lesser sequels, Monolith became a servant of Warner Bros' media licences.
Yet even in this role, Monolith's inventive, capricious personality shines through, as in 2012's bizarre multiplayer shooter Gotham City Imposters, where players assumed the roles of random Gotham citizens pretending to be Batman and the Joker. The highlight of the studio's latter years, however, was Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. An open-world game in the Assassin's Creed mould, Shadow of Mordor featured the remarkable Nemesis AI system, which reorganised Sauron's faceless army of orcs into a scheming political hierarchy, filled with recognisable personalities players would repeatedly encounter in tit-for-tat blood feuds.
Nemesis was a potentially genre-defining concept, an idea dozens of other games would borrow from and riff on. But we will never know what its influence could have been. Warner Bros patented the system in 2021, and the only game to feature it since is Monolith's final release, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Monolith was working on a Wonder Woman game that would also have featured the system, but this project was cancelled alongside Monolith's closure.
When a game studio closes, it can be difficult to gauge what is lost. Drive, perhaps, is what ultimately defines Monolith's legacy. Between its foundation in 1994 and Shadow of War's publication in 2017, Monolith created 23 games, one for every year of its existence up to that point. Which makes it more shocking that Monolith closed with nothing to show for its last eight years of existence.
That such a dependable studio failed to release another game in almost a decade should raise serious questions about modern industry practices and how studios are increasingly subject to the whims of executives, investors, and venture capitalists. The demand that every release be bigger and better looking, appealing to the widest audience, and poised to serve players for years, is transforming the industry into a zero-sum game – a game that some studios aren't allowed to finish, let alone win or lose.