Rebellion Developments is one of the last large British studios still owned by the people who started it. Brothers Jason Kingsley, the chief executive, and Chris Kingsley, the chief technology officer, founded the company in Oxford, England on December 4, 1992, and it remains privately held, independent and headquartered in that city more than three decades later. The break that got it off the ground came from Atari UK: the brothers showed Atari a 3D dragon-flight demo at the moment it was hunting for Atari Jaguar games, and Rebellion's first two releases, Checkered Flag and Alien vs Predator, both shipped on the Jaguar in 1994. The Alien and Predator license became a recurring thread, with Aliens Versus Predator arriving on PC in 1999 and Aliens vs. Predator (2010) debuting at number one in the UK charts. The studio's own flagship, though, is Sniper Elite. The 2005 original won Best PC/Console Game at that year's TIGA Awards and began a series that runs through Sniper Elite V2 (2012), Sniper Elite 3 (2014) and later entries up to Sniper Elite: Resistance (2025), a franchise Rebellion says has reached more than 20 million players. Around it sit the Zombie Army games, the 1930s pulp adventure Strange Brigade (2018), Evil Genius 2: World Domination (2021) and the post-war British survival game Atomfall, released on March 27, 2025.
Rebellion is unusual among game developers in how far it has spread beyond games. In June 2000 it bought the British comic 2000 AD from Fleetway Publications, taking on Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper with it, and that purchase became the basis of a publishing business that now includes the book imprints Solaris and Abaddon Books alongside the comic. The company has also grown by acquisition. In 2006 it took over Core Design, the original Tomb Raider studio, from Eidos, running it as Rebellion Derby until its closure in 2010, and in the same year it picked up the Elixir Studios properties Evil Genius and Republic: The Revolution. In 2009 it added a group of former Vivendi strategy properties including Ground Control, Empire Earth, Lords of Magic and Lords of the Realm, and later studio acquisitions became Rebellion Warwick in 2018 and Rebellion North in 2019. Rebellion Productions, founded in 2017 and housed in a converted newspaper factory in Didcot, England, is the company's film and television arm; its first feature was School's Out Forever (2021), and it is developing Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper projects. Jason Kingsley was awarded an OBE in 2012, and the company employed around 475 people as of 2022. For players, what matters is a studio that has kept its founders in charge and its own properties in house, and our catalog carries Sniper Elite 3 on Steam, which Rebellion both developed and publishes on PC.
