Behaviour Interactive

• 1. Introduction

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  Behaviour Interactive, the Montreal studio behind one of the most-played horror games on the planet, began not as a powerhouse but as a tiny Quebec City outfit called Megatoon in 1992. In the decades since, it has navigated name changes, corporate buyouts, near-dissolution, and a lawsuit that turned on software bugs being copied verbatim from one game to another. What the listener holds in their mind at the end of this story is not just a studio that got lucky with one hit. It is a company that spent years in the shadows building other people's games before it found its own voice. The questions worth sitting with are these: how does a work-for-hire factory reinvent itself as a creative force? And what does it cost to get there?

• 2. From Megatoon to Malofilm

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  Rémi Racine, who would eventually become the studio's CEO and executive producer, co-founded a Montreal company called Multimedia Interactive in 1994, two years after Megatoon was set up in Quebec City. Both companies developed interactive entertainment for CD-ROM, an emerging format of the mid-1990s. By 1996, a media conglomerate called Malofilm Communications had bought both, and a year later merged them into a single entity called Behaviour Interactive, with Racine installed as general manager.

  The newly merged studio had its first notable release almost immediately. Jersey Devil, a 3D platformer, came out in 1997 for PlayStation and later Windows. Distributed by Sony, it holds a modest but clear distinction: it was the first console game made entirely in Quebec. That local milestone drew attention from Infogrames Entertainment, which approached Behaviour to develop Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time, a game that reached shelves in 1999.

  Then came a pivot that would define the studio for more than a decade. In 1999, Racine and a group of investors bought the studio back from Malofilm. The price of that independence was a new name. By 2000, the studio was called Artificial Mind and Movement, abbreviated as A2M, and it was about to become one of the most prolific work-for-hire developers in the industry.

• 3. The A2M Years

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  Under the A2M banner, Behaviour built games for nearly every major publisher in the industry: Konami, Sony Computer Entertainment, Ubisoft, Disney Interactive Studios, Nintendo, EA, and Activision all appear in the client list from this period. The games were mostly licensed titles tied to films and television properties. A short list includes Ice Age, Kung Fu Panda: Legendary Warriors, Transformers Animated: The Game, and more than a dozen games in the Disney and Nickelodeon catalogue. It was unglamorous work by industry standards, but it kept a large team employed and taught the studio to operate at volume.

  In November 2008, A2M expanded beyond Montreal by acquiring Wanako Games, a studio based in Santiago, Chile. Activision Blizzard was the seller. Wanako was described at the time as the first and largest game studio in South America. The acquisition gave A2M a foothold in a new hemisphere, though the broader strategy remained the same: develop games on behalf of other brands.

  Alongside its client work, A2M also released a handful of original titles. Scaler came in 2004, Wet in 2009, and Naughty Bear in 2010. Naughty Bear was the outlier: it moved more than 800,000 console units, a figure significant enough that the studio later identified it as the groundwork for what came next. The name A2M itself had become a liability. In November 2010, the studio announced it was reverting to Behaviour Interactive. The reasons given were the growth of original games, the renewed availability of the old name, and, frankly, the fact that the initialism A2M carried an obscene connotation that had become harder to ignore.

• 4. Dead by Daylight

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  Dead by Daylight, the game that would transform Behaviour's finances, was released in 2016 on PC. The publisher was Starbreeze, a Swedish company. The game is an online asymmetric multiplayer survival horror title: one player controls a killer while up to four others try to escape. That asymmetry, and the steady stream of licensed killers and survivors drawn from horror franchises, gave the game an unusually long shelf life.

  Within its first two months, Dead by Daylight had sold more than one million copies. By 2022, it had accumulated more than 50 million players worldwide, and by November 2023, the player count had passed 60 million. Behaviour had not predicted a hit of this scale when it signed with Starbreeze, and when the opportunity arose to control the game's future directly, the studio acted. In 2018, Behaviour purchased the publishing rights to Dead by Daylight from Starbreeze for US $16 million.

  The financial consequences were stark. Behaviour's revenues stood at CAD $25 million in 2015. By 2021, they had reached CAD $225 million. That nine-fold increase in six years traces almost entirely to one game. Dead by Daylight also became a franchise: a dating sim spinoff called Hooked on You was released in the summer of 2022, a mobile version ran from 2020 to 2025, and by March 2023 it was announced that Blumhouse Productions, Atomic Monster, and Striker Entertainment would co-produce a film adaptation.

• 5. The Westworld Lawsuit

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  On the 21st of June 2018, while Behaviour was still riding the early momentum of Dead by Daylight's success, it was named as a co-defendant in a lawsuit filed by Bethesda Softworks. The target was Westworld, a mobile game based on the science fiction television series of the same name, which had been developed by Behaviour for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

  Bethesda's complaint was blunt. The company alleged that Westworld was a "blatant rip-off" of Fallout Shelter, a mobile game that Behaviour had co-developed with Bethesda. The suit, filed in a United States District Court for the District of Maryland, claimed the two games shared the same or highly similar game design, art style, animations, features, and gameplay elements. One detail gave the allegation unusual force: the lawsuit specifically claimed that Westworld had identically reproduced software bugs that had originally appeared in Fallout Shelter. Bethesda sought damages and a jury trial, alleging copyright infringement, breach of contract, and misappropriation of trade secrets.

  The case was settled out of court in January 2019. The terms were not disclosed publicly, but the episode had illustrated a hazard particular to work-for-hire studios: when the same team builds games for competing publishers, the question of what travels with them is never simple.

• 6. Growth, Layoffs, and Acquisitions

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  Behaviour entered the 2020s in expansion mode. An office in Toronto was announced in April 2022. The following month, the studio acquired Midwinter Entertainment, a Seattle-based developer. In February 2023, the UK-based SockMonkey Studios joined the group, rebranded as Behaviour UK - North. A second UK studio opened in Truro, Cornwall in July 2023 under the name Behaviour UK - South. In August 2023, Codeglue, a Netherlands-based developer, was acquired and renamed Behaviour Rotterdam.

  Not all of those expansions held. Midwinter was closed on the 18th of September 2024, and with it came the cancellation of a Dead by Daylight spinoff that had been in development under the internal codename Project T. The same period brought two rounds of layoffs at the Montreal headquarters: 45 employees in January 2024, then an additional 95 in April 2024-70 of them based in Montreal. The April cut also ended the Business Solutions unit, which was folded into a new Immersive Entertainment vertical focused on location-based entertainment.

  The acquisitions continued despite the contractions. In September 2024, Behaviour acquired Red Hook Studios, the developers of Darkest Dungeon and its sequel. Unlike Midwinter, Red Hook was structured to continue operating as an independent studio within the group. In March 2024, Fly Studio, a Montreal-based multimedia experience designer, was brought in to anchor the location-based entertainment push. Then in March 2026, Behaviour acquired The Fun Pimps, the developer of 7 Days to Die.

• 7. Crunch Policy and Workplace Culture

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  Behaviour made headlines for a reason that had nothing to do with a game release: it became one of the first video game studios to formally abolish crunch. Crunch is the industry term for mandatory extended hours, often unpaid, that developers are expected to work as a project approaches its deadline. The practice is widespread and has generated years of criticism over its effects on worker health and retention.

  Behaviour's decision to end crunch earned it a public recognition that no game could provide on its own. Gamesindustry.biz named the studio one of Canada's Best Workplaces in 2018, and the designation was repeated in 2021 and 2022. The policy represents a deliberate choice made at the management level, and Racine, who has led the studio since its reconstitution under the Behaviour name in 1997, has been the figure most associated with it.

  In May 2023, Concordia University in Montreal announced the creation of a new research chair in video game design, housed in its Department of Design and Computation Arts and funded by Behaviour. The studio committed CAD $2 million over ten years to support that chair, a commitment that points toward the studio's understanding of its position not just as a commercial entity but as part of Montreal's broader creative and academic ecosystem.