The story
Bizarre Creations started as Raising Hell Software, founded by Martyn Chudley. Sega scorned "Hell", and the company went nameless for a short time. In 1994, a pending submission to Psygnosis/Sony forced the decision of a new name. The founder tentatively left "Weird Concepts" on the submission documentation. Then a staff member used Microsoft Word's thesaurus, and "Bizarre Creations" stuck.
The Bizarre Creations team was initially five strong, and worked on a concept project called "Slaughter". After seeing the demo, Psygnosis signed the team onto Formula 1 for PlayStation. Formula 1 went on to become the best-selling game in Europe in 1996.
On 26 September 2007, publisher Activision acquired Bizarre Creations for $107.4m; $67.4m immediately payable with a further $40m contingent hitting certain goals over a 5-year period.
Activision announced that Project Gotham Racing 4 would be Bizarre Creations' last game for Microsoft Game Studios, and Microsoft did retain the rights for the Project Gotham Racing franchise.
On 16 November 2010, Activision announced it was considering closing Bizarre and "exploring our options regarding the future of the studio, including a potential sale of the business". Activision later stated that no buyer could be found and that the studio would close. The studio would conclude with a two-minute farewell video, put together by in-house editor Eamon Urtone.
Pete Collier, Ben Ward and Stephen Cakebread of Bizarre Creations founded mobile game developer Hogrocket in 2011, and shut it down the following year. A week after the closure of the studio, many former employees went on to found Lucid Games, which continued development on the Geometry Wars franchise, among various other ventures.
From Wikipedia’s article on Bizarre Creations, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4