Every so often, an industry settles somewhere that nobody would have predicted. Steel went to Sheffield, ceramics to Stoke, whilst video games, of all things, went to a commuter town in Surrey, best known for its cobbled high street and a cathedral on the hill. There is little on the drive in from the A3 to suggest that Guildford has anything to do with blockbuster console launches, yet behind its unassuming business parks sits one of the most concentrated clusters of games studios anywhere in Europe.
The nickname followed naturally enough, with Guardian writer Stuart Heritage christening the town the ‘Hollywood of Video Games’ back in 2014. It has stuck ever since.
Where It Began
The story starts, as it so often does around here, with Peter Molyneux. In 1987, he and Les Edgar founded Bullfrog Productions in Guildford, which was a studio that went on to define entire genres with the likes of Populous, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. Electronic Arts backed the studio through those early hits before acquiring it outright in 1995. It is fair to say the relationship set a pattern that Guildford has followed ever since, using local talent, welcoming global publisher money and a studio that eventually outgrew its own walls.
What happened next mattered just as much as Bullfrog itself. As staff moved on to create or join new ventures, the town’s games scene kept regenerating rather than fading. Criterion, whose Burnout and Need for Speed titles became era-defining racers, began life as a Guildford graphics research firm in the early 1990s, before setting up its own games studio and eventually landing at EA. Media Molecule, founded in 2006 by a group of friends who met whilst working at Lionhead Studios, moved into a small office above a bathroom shop in the town.
They went on to create LittleBigPlanet and Dreams. Sony liked what it saw so much, it bought the studio outright not long after. Little wonder locals talk about Guildford’s games scene as one long family tree.
A Cluster That Kept Growing
Four decades on, the numbers tell their own story. Guildford is currently home to more than two dozen games studios and publishers, amongst them Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Supermassive Games, Fireproof Games, Hello Games and Mediatonic, as well as newer arrivals still finding their feet. The University of Surrey says the wider Surrey Research Park, which it runs, now hosts more than 200 tech businesses, a good number of them gaming outfits, and the sector’s inward investment into the area has passed the billion-pound mark.
The university has leaned into the reputation rather than shied away from it. It runs a dedicated Games Design degree, and in June 2024 it opened a £2.3 million Games Innovation Zone on its Stag Hill campus, pairing academics working in fields such as AI and neuroscience with local studios and everyday players to tackle problems the industry is grappling with. It is the kind of civic-academic partnership that towns twice the size would struggle to pull off and it goes some way to explaining why so many graduates stay put once they finish their degree.
The Gaming Habit Runs Deep
It would be a mistake to think all this activity is confined to office hours in a business park. Guildford’s relationship with games is more intrinsic than that and nowhere is this more obvious than amongst the students who make up a sizable chunk of the population. The University of Surrey’s Video Gaming Society meets regularly and fields teams across several titles through the National University Esports League, whilst game jams and hackathons run by the university’s Computer Science Society give students a taste of the industry long before they graduate into it.
Counter-Strike is very much part of that mix, too. Surrey fields its own competitive Counter-Strike 2 side under the National Student eSports banner, taking on rivals from other UK universities much as its Rocket League and League of Legends teams do. For anyone plugged into that scene, kitting out a loadout with CS2 skins is as much a pre-match ritual as running through tactics. It says something about how far the game’s culture has spread beyond the professional circuit and into student halls.
Guildford might have built its name on Sackboy and Burnout, but the gaming habit clearly runs in more directions than the studios alone would suggest. Whether that pipeline keeps producing the next Molyneux or Healey remains to be seen, but on current form, Guildford’s claim to the title looks safe for a good while yet.