If you read my last blog entry you know Mark Edmonds told me he started up a new company with three friends from Rare. He said the company was unannounced so I figured we will find out about it soon enough. Today however I decided to do a little digging to see if I could find out anything about it beforehand.

One of the things I enjoyed most about being an investigative journalist was the part where I got to play detective. Many exclusives on Raretopia started as a seemingly unimportant clue left by someone. From fragments of information it is surprising how much you can actually find on the Internet if you only take the time to do it. The below took me no more than ten minutes once I figured out what to look for.

The tiny clue Mark left me was that his three colleagues also left Rare a couple of years ago. Since I recently updated my Rare personnel database I had a pretty good idea about who recently left the company. One by one, I took the names of the people and searched LinkedIn for clues. There it suddenly was: on the profile of Ross Bury it says he is a director at Starfire Studios. This was the first time I heard of it so I did a Google search on the company combined with Ross’s name.

Lo and behold there it was on the first page: a company check on Starfire Studios along with the names of the other three directors: Mark Edmonds, Chris Tilston and Phil Dunne. So that’s where they ended up! My next step was to look for the company website. Since it was a British company I tried starfirestudios.co.uk first and struck gold immediately. Unfortunately all it has is a splash image saying “Launch Sequence Initiated”.

Satisfied with my findings I emailed Mark about them and also asked if it would be possible to be granted an interview. Impressed with my detective work, he said he would check with Phil who is handling the PR side of the company. Fingers crossed!