United Kingdom · Founded 1986 · 1980s
Founded by two teenage brothers who had already made £200,000 writing budget games — and who went on to build one of Britain's longest-surviving studios, plus the Game Genie.
Codemasters was founded in October 1986 by brothers Richard and David Darling, with help from their father Jim, operating initially from the Beaumont Business Centre in Banbury. The brothers were not novices. They had already made a substantial success of writing games for the budget publisher Mastertronic — earning around £200,000 by the ages of sixteen and seventeen respectively, and acquiring a 50% stake in Mastertronic, which they sold in March 1986 in order to strike out independently. The company became a fixture of the British budget software market and then something considerably larger. It found major success with the Micro Machines series and Pete Sampras Tennis on the Mega Drive, and later built two of the most durable racing franchises in the industry: Colin McRae Rally, which grew into the DiRT series, and the official Formula One games. It also produced the Game Genie, the cheat cartridge that Nintendo went to court over. Codemasters is one of the oldest British game studios still operating, and the Darlings were appointed Commanders of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to the video game industry — an unusually formal endorsement for two men who started out selling cassette games out of a business centre in Oxfordshire.