Slingshot Cartel was founded by Jamie Jackson, David Osbourn, Jonathan Napier and Gareth Morrison. All four were previously employed at FreeStyleGames, where they held positions as studio heads, development director and assistant art director, respectively, while Jackson and Osbourn were also two of the six founders of that studio. Based in Leamington Spa, within Warwickshire, England, Slingshot Cartel was incorporated as a limited liability partnership, at the United Kingdom'sCompanies House, on 9 September 2016, while its opening was announced on 31 January 2017. Under Activision as their parent company, FreeStyleGames had been responsible for the development of Guitar Hero Live, a refresh of the Guitar Hero series, which was released in 2015. While Guitar Hero Live received positive reviews, it failed to succeed commercially, as a result of which, Activision announced on 1 April 2016 that they would restructure FreeStyleGames, laying off 50 staff and putting the company into a solely supporting role for other Activision-developed projects. Jackson, Osbourn, Napier and Morrison decided to leave the company, with the prior two expressing their disappointment with how typical developer/publisher interactions that led to such situations; Jackson stated "We were a bitfed up of how that worked." The Slingshot Cartel founders' experience in developing Guitar Hero Live, which used full motion video extensively, was more in line with the traditional approach used in filmmaking where they had only a few full-time staff on the game throughout its development while bringing in other departments or outsourcing to other developers when necessary, at one point have over one thousand people involved; Jackson said that by example, an artist for a game may only be needed 60% of the development time. They plan to apply the same principles for development of games within Slingshot Cartel to avoid the monolithic nature of traditional games development, using their experience in the industry and their range of contacts to bring in the appropriate people at the right time. This approach will also enable them to work on multiple titles at the same time. The studio's name reflects this philosophy, given that a slingshot may be made of a wide range of materials, and that a cartel reflects an organised group of people with their own rules. Slingshot Cartel is presently working on two titles. Their first title, revealed at the 2017 Game Developers Conference, is The DRG Initiative, a multiplayer third-person shooter built atop the Amazon's Lumberyardgame engine, that ties in directly into Twitch streaming, allowing Twitch viewers to influence the outcomes of the game's battles. According to Jackson, the studio chose to use Lumberyard, because "using Lumberyard along with the support of Amazon, has allowed to move ahead faster and more smoothly than ever done in 20 years of making games", and anticipates using it to develop titles within the growing esports field. Developed in partnership with Third Kind Games, The DRG Initiative was released into Steam's early access programme on 14 December 2017.
