Beach House

Why Hangar 13, maker of Mafia III, is expanding to the UK seaside.

Hangar 13’s new Brighton studio began, like so many of the good things in life, over a pint. Andy Wilson and Nick Baynes worked together, years ago, at Black Rock, the developer of Split/Second that was shut down by parent company Disney in 2011. They’ve taken very different paths since. Wilson went off to build a studio for Codemasters in Guildford, then helped Ubisoft do likewise in Toronto, before joining Hangar 13 in 2014. Baynes stayed local, working in small, agile indie teams after years on the console-game treadmill. Yet he and his core team had been feeling the itch a bit. They yearned for a big project.

“We’d still meet at E3s and GDCs for a quick catch-up and a beer,” Baynes tells us, going on to recall the meeting at GDC 2017 that would birth a whole new studio. “I was just saying to Andy that we wanted to get back into console development, that we had big ambitions and a hungry team that had learned a lot. It was a purely innocent conversation, but unbeknownst to me Hangar 13 had been discussing growing in other locations. It started to make sense.”