To get into the game industry – at least at the level he’d always dreamed of – Joe Brammer had to tell a lie. In 2014, just as he was about to graduate from university, he applied for what was then the brand-new ID@Xbox scheme, which enabled novice developers to pitch to Microsoft in the hope of receiving an Xbox One development kit and a subscription to Unreal Engine. “I’d wanted to make games since I was 11, modding Battlefield,” Brammer says. “So I lied on the form, saying I’d worked for loads of people, like Lionhead. It’s funny when you look at that list of the first ID@Xbox studios now: CryTek, Sumo Digital, me.”
Working with a team of friends from his course, Brammer would co-create a firstperson Myst-style puzzler called Pneuma: Breath Of Life. “If we launched it today, we’d get slaughtered,” he continues. “It’s awful. But it was the first Unreal Engine 4 game on Xbox One, so Epic put us in all their booths”. Helped along by that whirlwind exposure, the game made about £400,000 in its first six months, more than enough to get production going on a new project. It also incentivised the formal founding of Bulkhead as a studio.
From a variety of fleetingly occupied offices around Derby (“We’ve moved about ten times by now,” Brammer says), the expanded and newly rebranded team would go to work on its next game, a follow-up first-person puzzler called, with an almost hubristic pragmatism, The Turing Test. Just like getting accepted into the ID@Xbox scheme, when it came to Bulkhead’s masthead debut, the ends were more important than the means, and what mattered above all was the will to get things done. “We basically made the whole game in white box, with about 100 puzzles,” Brammer recalls. “Then we went to a local college and we added a little popup at the end of each puzzle asking people to rate the difficulty and how much they enjoyed it. And then we put them in that order, on a spaceship. Honestly, it was easy.”
Cry Havoc
But if Bulkhead had been unfailingly confident up until now – and had grown to be much more successful, much more quickly, than its founders had ever anticipated – the studio’s next game would bring its surging momentum to a near-terminal stop. During development of The Turing Test, team members had taken to spending their lunchtimes playing competitive rounds of Call Of Duty 2 and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Inspired by this older generation of multiplayer shooters – and deciding that they were, in Brammer’s words, “bored” with the puzzle genre – the team at Bulkhead started work on Battalion 1944, a World War II FPS that would pluck on players’ nostalgia for old-school COD. “But because it was a ‘classic shooter’, it just didn’t have any long-term retention,” explains UI and UX designer Howard Philpott. “We delivered,” Brammer continues. “We made an old-school shooter that reminds you of that era of games. But nobody wants to play that for more than three hours.”
Beyond the lack of long-term appeal, Battalion faced other, more immediate problems. After a highly successful Kickstarter, Bulkhead had once again partnered with Square Enix, its publisher for The Turing Test. Owing to a well-targeted pre-launch campaign, the studio had managed to push Battalion to the very top of the Twitch viewership charts – “We had some of the biggest streamers playing our game,” Brammer remembers. Ultimately, however, being one of the most watched games in the world would only serve to make the collapse of Battalion more spectacular, and leave an even bigger bruise on Bulkhead’s soul.
“We were using this thing for the backend called Google App Engine,” Brammer says. “It wasn’t really designed for what we were using it for, but in the alpha and beta test, it had been fine. On release day, though, once we hit 12,345 players, it all went down. Turned out, a Google programmer had just put in an arbitrary limit on users – someone at Google had gone, ‘Ah, just put in a limit, whatever – 12345’, so when we hit that number, it crashed. If they’d put ‘123456’, it would have been fine.”
“So we’re there phoning Google,” Philpott continues, “trying to find out what’s going on, and all the time we’re also watching TimTheTatman streaming the game. ‘Oh my god, TimTheTatman is streaming the game, and he can’t get into the server’.”
While Pneuma and The Turing Test had helped to put it on the map, and given shape to a dogged and strident work ethic – almost a bravura – that would remain at the core of its collective personality, Battalion would be the game to really define Bulkhead as a studio. “We were 24 at the time,” Brammer remembers. “We were saying, ‘We’re ready to release it’. But the adults in the room probably should have said, ‘Yeah, we need to delay it another six months’. It was a huge scar for us. It knocked our confidence. It’s why you haven’t heard of us until Wardogs. But then you don’t get Wardogs without us making the mistakes on Battalion.”
Despite learning some tough lessons from its first attempt at a shooter, Bulkhead’s route back into the genre – and to creating its most successful game to date – would be far from straightforward. After releasing Battalion, the studio was approached by Splash Damage with an offer to work on the infamously troubled, and eventually cancelled, Transformers Reactivate. Some time later, in December 2022, Splash Damage would buy Bulkhead outright. It was a close and affectionate relationship. “They always protected us from businesses and publishers,” Brammer says.
Let slip the dogs of war
But a complication was on the way. Under Splash Damage, Bulkhead had already begun work on the prototype version of Wardogs. However, when Splash Damage’s parent company, Tencent, sold Splash Damage in 2025, it also negotiated a deal whereby it would keep Bulkhead. This transference of ownership – inheriting these new overseers – had never been part of Bulkhead’s plan. And so Brammer was suddenly rushing around, reaching out to potential partners and investors, trying to find a way to buy back the studio that he’d co-created. “I remember saying to people, ‘If you have another job offer, please take it’. And they were saying, ‘I believe in you, Joe. You can get it done’. I was like, ‘I’m telling you, we’re going to die!’ I was trying to kick people out but they just wouldn’t go.”
Those few months were arduous, but ultimately, in December 2025, the buyback was completed successfully. Less than eight weeks later, Bulkhead announced Wardogs. “For a British studio to make an FPS game of this scale, it’s a big deal,” Brammer says now. “I went through the British game-development education system, from college to university to making our own studio. I’m quite proud of that.” Now in early access, to a certain extent Wardogs’ success speaks for itself: since arriving on Steam in September, it’s sold over three million copies and maintained an average concurrent player count of more than 200,000. For Brammer, however, the game also illustrates the efficacy of Bulkhead’s studio culture. He makes no secret of the fact that Bulkhead expects its staff to crunch. More than that, he says that certain attitudes, perhaps more common in today’s videogame industry than in the past, are unlikely to fit in with the company’s practices and beliefs.
“We liked how talent-driven the industry used to be,” Brammer says. “And then it started to be about, ‘Everyone should be able to get a job in games’. We don’t really think like that. The floodgates opened, but now they’re closing again, and there might be some benefit to saying to people: ‘You have to be fucking good to be here, and you have to prove your worth’.
“Our team doesn’t love working late, but they do work late and we do crunch. What we’re saying is that sometimes, yes, life is more important. But sometimes, when you’re on the eve of releasing a game that keeps you all employed, work’s more important.” The more Brammer talks about Bulkhead’s ways of working, the more emphatic he becomes about the virtues of those expectations. “My mum was a teacher and a headteacher at a school,” he says. “I’ve never seen someone do so much crunch for barely any money. And so when game devs are like, ‘I don’t want to work overtime for my 100K salary’? Fuck. Off. Respectfully, it’s Californian bullshit.”
With regard to Wardogs itself, Brammer believes that the game has been aided by a certain creative absolutism. “A lot of modern business books will say, ‘You want to make sure everyone’s got a voice’, but I think that’s complete bullshit when you’re in a creative endeavour. You want to make sure everyone is heard, but that’s not the same as everyone has a voice.”
Despite this somewhat centralised approach to making games, Philpott says Bulkhead’s developers will often work across multiple areas of Wardogs. “Everyone has done something that’s not in their job description,” he says. “Everyone wears multiple hats, because they can see the path to success with the product.” In return, Brammer says that Bulkhead offers its staff a variety of bonuses and the opportunity to own shares in the company. With the early-access launch of Wardogs behind it, everybody at the studio will also be going on leave for the entire month of December. “We’re going to make sure players know they can fuck off in December,” Brammer says, laughing. “Go play GTAVI. We need to detox.”
As for Bulkhead’s next steps, there are plans to open a new office in Manchester and also to make – in Brammer’s words – “more games using our FPS technology”. But both he and some of the studio’s other senior figures are also thinking about the future in more philosophical terms. At the very top of its website, Bulkhead provides what is both its company motto and its ostensible mission statement: ‘The next big shooter studio’. Having finally released Wardogs, and seemingly cemented its place among the heights of the FPS genre, there is, for Brammer, a sense that this era of Bulkhead is complete – that the studio can now become something beyond what he’s been building for the past decade.
“We’re keen for people who are juniors and mid-level to step into leadership, so the old guard aren’t always running it,” Brammer concludes. “I mean, I guess just by default we’re a big shooter studio now. But I also don’t think that’s what we were really ever chasing. The best thing we can do is put Bulkhead in a position where it doesn’t require us.”
