Pandemic Studios

Pandemic Studios was founded in 1998 in Los Angeles by Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick, emerging from the team that had worked on Activision's Battlezone. The studio specialized in accessible, spectacle-driven action and strategy games, often built around military and open-world themes, and it quickly became a dependable maker of crowd-pleasing blockbusters.

Pandemic's biggest success came with Star Wars: Battlefront (2004) and Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005), large-scale multiplayer shooters that let players fight iconic battles across the Star Wars galaxy on the ground and in space. They were enormous hits and remain fondly remembered, so much so that they anchored a later franchise revival by another studio. Pandemic also created the Mercenaries series of explosive open-world action games, the cult favorite Destroy All Humans!, in which players wreaked comic alien havoc on 1950s America, and the Full Spectrum Warrior tactical games. Its final release, The Saboteur (2009), was a stylish open-world adventure set in Nazi-occupied Paris, notable for using color to signal areas under oppression.

In 2007, Electronic Arts acquired Pandemic together with BioWare in a landmark deal, part of a partnership with investment firm Elevation Partners, valued in the hundreds of millions to around a billion dollars. Under EA, Pandemic continued development but faced the pressures of a shifting market and a global economic downturn. In late 2008 EA began cutting the studio, and in 2009, shortly after The Saboteur launched, EA closed Pandemic Studios entirely, laying off its remaining staff.

The closure came as a shock given the studio's track record and the size of the acquisition, and it became a frequently cited example of a talented developer lost inside a larger publisher. Pandemic's franchises endured in memory and, in the case of Battlefront, in a high-profile modern revival, but the studio that built them was gone within two years of being bought.