Bless You, Morpheme.

We rarely do heartfelt sentiment here at Honeyslug, but we are unable to let the passing of Morpheme into history once and for all go without mention – it has played a huge part in where we are today, and the redundancy of the final 4 staff including remaining founder Matt Spall this week has been a real shame, because it finally means the end of a company which nutured a great deal of talented people over the last decade or so, wherever possible giving them the freedom to experiment, work on things until they were ready, and in many cases the space to figure out what kind of job they even wanted to be doing anyway.

More recently, Matt and the remaining team (as well as a number of ex-staff) have been hugely supportive of us - we may never have got off the ground had we not had their advice and support (and work).

I’ve led something of a nomadic existence in the games industry, and Morpheme (in all its forms) was my home for just under 7 years - that’s the second longest job I’ve had. It was Ricky’s home for 9 years (his only full time job) and Nat’s for over 3 - you don’t stay in one place too long if it’s “just a job”, and these people were not just our colleagues, many are our friends too. Now as the remaining staff move onto pastures new, we wish them every success as they did with us not so long ago. For a final time, the Morpheme roll call (in alphabetical order) was:

Ronald Batty, Justin Buck, Jeremy Carpenter, Robin Clarke, Elliot Curtis, Zane Desir, Jonathan Fisher, Andrew Fitter, Daniel Fordham, Chancal Gill, Ricky Haggett, William Hanson, Lee Higgins, Jonathan Hughes, Stephen Hughes, Mark Inman, Ben Jessell, Davina Lee, Joanne Low, Peter Lumby, Natalie Marco, Paul O’Sullivan, Lucy Reed, Dr. Steven Shipton, Matthew Spall, Frank Sun, Paul Welton, Christopher White, Julian Wolter, Haralambos Xiouros.

For a more eloquent and well structured review of its history, you should read the excellent City State site written by Rob Clarke: http://citystate.co.uk/archives/morpheme-1999-2008