Ubisoft's Newcastle studio, one of the UK's longest-running game makers, known for the Driver series and work on major Ubisoft games.
Ubisoft Reflections is a video game studio in Newcastle upon Tyne, part of the French publisher Ubisoft. It says it is the country's longest-lasting games studio, with more than 40 years of game making. It is best known for racing and driving games, including Destruction Derby and the Driver series, and it has worked on Ubisoft titles such as The Division, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Grow Home, Just Dance and Assassin's Creed Nexus VR.
The studio says it wants to be a fun, inclusive place where people share a passion for making games. Its studio manager, Michael Burnham, who has over 30 years in the industry, talks about curiosity, teamwork and openness to new ideas, and about helping people grow and build work they are proud of. These are the studio's own words. Ubisoft Reflections' own page lists Assassin's Creed Nexus VR, The Division, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Grow Home as examples, with the studio sometimes leading and sometimes co-leading development. Destruction Derby was praised for its physics and crash damage, and Driver became a long-running series of car-chase games.
Reflections was founded in 1984 by Martin Edmondson and Nicholas Chamberlain, who began by making games for the BBC Micro. Its name became widely known with Shadow of the Beast in 1989 and Destruction Derby in 1995. It joined Ubisoft in 2006, together with the Driver series, and since then it has often supported or co-led work on big Ubisoft games. Its sister studio in Leamington Spa closed in January 2025 when the Newcastle studio was downsized. An older source gave over 240 staff in 2018, and the current number is not published in the pages we read. Ubisoft acquired the Leamington Spa studio FreeStyle Games in 2017, and that studio became Ubisoft Leamington before it closed in January 2025.
The studio's page describes a team with varied career paths and backgrounds. It also promotes Newcastle as a place to live, with music venues, galleries, historic sites such as Hadrian's Wall, and nearby beaches at Whitley Bay and Tynemouth. The studio's page presents Newcastle as a lively place to live as well as work.
A studio like Reflections employs programmers, artists, animators, designers, producers, audio staff and testers. Learning a game engine, building small projects and studying maths or art are good preparation. Look at the Ubisoft careers site and the studio's pages for current roles.
Website: www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/studio/fgol/about-us
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