2K Australia traces its origins to April 2000, when Irrational Games, the Boston studio that had made its name with System Shock 2, opened a second office in Canberra under the name Irrational Games Australia. Jonathan Chey, one of Irrational's three co-founders, led the Canberra operation, which quickly became more than a satellite: it worked alongside Boston on the tactical police shooter SWAT 4 and the sci-fi shooter Tribes: Vengeance, establishing a track record in systems-driven first-person design that would define the studio's output for the rest of its life. The corporate picture changed in January 2006 when Take-Two Interactive acquired Irrational Games and placed it under its 2K publishing label, and in August 2007 the two Irrational studios were formally split apart, with the Canberra team renamed 2K Australia. Under that name it contributed to BioShock, the game that turned Irrational's immersive-sim lineage into a mainstream phenomenon, and it would go on to support two more of 2K's most ambitious projects, BioShock Infinite and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
The studio's identity shifted once more between April 2010 and November 2011, when it operated under the banner of its sister studio 2K Marin before reverting to 2K Australia, a reflection of how closely the two teams were interwoven on the publisher's shooter projects during that period. Its defining moment as a lead developer came in 2014 with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, the entry that bridges the original Borderlands and Borderlands 2 and moves the series' loot-driven co-op shooting to Pandora's moon. 2K Australia led development, with Gearbox Software providing development support, and the result is the credit the studio is best remembered for and the reason its name sits on PJ's Games' shelves today. That success was not enough to overcome the economics of the region: on April 16, 2015, 2K Australia closed, with the cost of running a game studio in Australia given as the stated reason, and its former web domain, 2kaustralia.com, now simply redirects to 2k.com. Fifteen years of work on some of the most respected first-person games of their era, from SWAT 4 to BioShock to the Pre-Sequel, is what the studio leaves behind, and the Borderlands entry it led remains as playable and as sharp as it was at launch.
