Eidos Interactive was the London publisher that gave the late 1990s some of its most recognizable PC and console franchises, and its family tree runs back to two very different companies. The games side descends from Domark, founded in 1984 in Putney, London, by Mark Strachan and Dominic Wheatley, while Eidos itself began as a developer of video compression software for systems like the Acorn Archimedes, with Stephen B. Streater among its founders and Charles Cornwall as chairman. The two came together in September 1995, when Eidos announced the acquisition of Domark along with the developers Simis and Big Red Software for £12.9 million and floated on the London Stock Exchange the same year, with Ian Livingstone joining as executive chairman and later serving as creative director. Simis and Big Red Software were merged into Domark on 31 May 1996, but the defining deal had already closed a month earlier: in April 1996 Eidos took over CentreGold for £17.6 million, bringing in the distributor CentreSoft, the publisher U.S. Gold, and the development studios Core Design and Silicon Dreams Studio. Core Design was the studio behind Tomb Raider, and Lara Croft turned the newly formed Wimbledon-based publisher into a household name almost overnight. The catalog that followed reads like a shelf of PC classics: Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and its sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War, Hitman, Thief, Legacy of Kain and Championship Manager, backed by studio acquisitions that included Crystal Dynamics in September 1998 and IO Interactive in March 2004, then in development on Hitman: Contracts. In November 2007 the publisher opened Eidos-Montréal specifically to build new Deus Ex games, a decision that would shape the label's legacy long after the original company was gone.
The corporate story from there is one of takeovers and a surprising second life. SCi Entertainment completed its takeover of Eidos on 16 May 2005 and rebranded the combined business as Eidos in December 2008, only for Square Enix to make its own offer in February 2009 and buy Eidos plc for £84.3 million, with the takeover completed on 22 April 2009 and the merger finalized on 10 November 2009 as Square Enix Limited, better known as Square Enix Europe. The Eidos Interactive publisher name fell out of use at that point, surviving only in the name of Eidos-Montréal, the studio that went on to deliver Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided under the Square Enix banner. Then in August 2022 Embracer Group completed its acquisition of Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, Square Enix Montréal and the intellectual property behind Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and Legacy of Kain, forming the operative group CDE (Crystal Dynamics - Eidos) Entertainment under Phil Rogers. Since that change of ownership, the Deus Ex games have been published on digital storefronts under the name Eidos Interactive Corp., which is why Steam now credits Eidos Interactive as the publisher of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Adam Jensen's 2016 return to a divided Prague where augmented humans are segregated from the rest of society. For players, that means the label attached to some of the most influential immersive sims and stealth games ever made is once again the name on the box, and the collection here brings together the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided releases for PC on Steam and Xbox One from a publisher whose history is stitched into the DNA of the genres it helped define.
