The Bizarre Creations Website announces that Activision has purchased the developer of the Project Gotham Racing series as well as sort-of spin-off Geometry Wars. The update makes it clear that this move was not necessitated by any financial woes, there will be no redundancies (firings) as a result, and that they will not become "Activision Liverpool." What will change, however, is that they will become much more of a multiplatform developer. Here's a bit from the announcement, which teases two upcoming "AAA" titles, a racing game and a "character game":

The perfect solution for us is to join the ranks of Activision, alongside their other talented studios. It's a pretty incredible chance for Bizarre to improve ourselves and make the most of all the fantastic new opportunities this opens up. Also, given the excellent support Activision offer this can mean only one thing: better games.

This is fundamentally a different deal than some you've seen around the industry recently. Bizarre isn't a developer in financial trouble, and we're certainly not looking to be "saved" by a bigger corporation. We're a dev looking to take our games to the next level, and make the absolute best products we can possibly make. Likewise, Activision is not in the business of "buying out" struggling developers either.

As you can imagine then, Bizarre are very happy with this move. Here's the lowdown:

    >> Bizarre Creations continues to exist as is. We won't become Activision Liverpool or anything like that.

    >> We will have absolutely no redundancies.

    >> All of our teams continue to exist exactly how they are at the moment. Amax team (PGR4) and Shitstorm team (The Club) will move onto new games, whilst our Shared Technology team will use this opportunity to take our experience and tech to new levels and new formats.

    >> The Activision way of running things is "hands off". Bizarre continue to have creative control over what we do, we still run the studio how we see fit, and we still get to run our own web site and do all sorts of fun community things! :)

Let's talk games then... that's why we're all here after all. Well, we're no longer tied to just one platform for starters. Our future titles can be on whatever we please - we are a truly multiplatform studio now. Of course that doesn't mean that we'll be forced to make a port of every game to every console in existence... we simply have that option available to us.

Both of our two main game teams are about to start work on two new AAA titles for Activision. One will be a racing game, and the other a character game. Of course we'll make some more detailed announcements in the future, but be prepared for something big and exciting!