Devil's Details Ltd. is a Sheffield, England studio formed in late 2007 by Pete Bratcher and Steve Oldacre, two developers who had each been working as contractors before deciding to build a company of their own. The pairing was deliberately complementary. Bratcher brought the technology side, a mathematician's head for optimisation and a record of delivering cutting edge solutions, while Oldacre brought considerable programming experience together with a background in building, organising and managing teams. Their founding idea reached beyond the games shelf: alongside work in the established games industry, the studio set out to carry game production into markets that had rarely used it, including advertising campaigns, training programs, film productions and social networking sites. Registered in England and Wales as company 06259586 and a member of Game Republic, the regional network for UK developers, Devil's Details built its in-house technology around a clear philosophy - keep it lightweight and decoupled, favour proven open source solutions over reinventing the wheel, and let the technology serve the project rather than become the point of it.
For PC players the studio's name is best known from the credits of three SEGA conversions. Devil's Details brought Sonic Generations to PC in 2011, putting Sonic Team's anniversary celebration of the series in front of a new audience, and followed it in 2012 with Binary Domain, the squad shooter from the team behind the Yakuza series, as well as a PC conversion of Virtua Tennis 4. Those conversions are how all three games made it onto a computer, and for anyone playing them there it is Devil's Details' work under the hood. The studio also shipped original games on Sony hardware: Top Darts on PlayStation 3, designed around the Move controller, a second Top Darts for PlayStation Vita, and Table Top Tanks, a Vita title built on the handheld's augmented reality technology. That mix, precise conversion work on one side and small hardware-led originals on the other, fits a studio that treated technology as a means rather than an end. Its public output is concentrated in the 2010 to 2012 period, with the studio's own site last updated in 2012, but the PC versions of Sonic Generations and Binary Domain keep a small Sheffield team's craftsmanship in circulation well over a decade on.
