Hydratac: A Next-Generation Shooter Game Company

Hydratac is a small company with just seven people working on a next-generation “extremely realistic” shooter game, and it has raised $3 million.

The Team Behind Hydratac

The company is run by former venture capitalist Louis Gresham and supported by former Treyarch studio co-head Dan Bunting, who is a Hydratac board member. They have essentially switched roles in the process of bringing this studio to life.

“As a VC, I used to joke that it would take a long time for me to even the scales with time on the
investor side, given I had spent 15 years pre-VC as an entrepreneur/exec/operator/builder at
multiple cofounded startups, Google X, Riot Games, and Deloitte,” Gresham said. “Today I’m ecstatic to announce that those scales have tipped back the other way – I’m returning to entrepreneurship after spending almost five years as cofounder/partner at 1am Gaming VC and our parent firm March Capital.”

He added, “Dan Bunting (formerly of Call of Duty) is going to be my board member. We’re building an extremely realistic military simulation with an initial focus on close-quarters battle.”

Louis Gresham is CEO of Hydratec.

The Vision and Progress

Bunting spent his career building the Call of Duty franchise at Treyarch, where he rose to studio co-head and helped create games such as the Call of Duty: Black Ops and Zombies franchises. He left Activision amid some of the turmoil the company went through in the Me-Too era. Bunting has not talked publicly about those circumstances in detail but there has been plenty written about it.

The work on Hydratac started last year, and Gresham realized “it was simply too massive, and too perfect a fit, for us to not have me plant a flag in the gap.”

First-person shooters are a massive market, the team had a lot of experience and an interesting tech and product. So he pulled the trigger and joined them as CEO.

Late last year, the company raised $3 million in initial capital from lead 1am Gaming VC and HGM Fund. The team has seven full-time people, and it has the first iteration of the product up and running internally. The company is testing daily, has several open positions, and is on schedule for a public launch in 2025, Gresham said.

“Though we’re not ready to unveil quite everything publicly about what we’re building yet (and
who’s building it, including my cofounder, given the even crazier attention these names will
attract in the community!), here’s what we can share today: we’re developing what will be an
unprecedentedly high fidelity military simulation, starting with CQB, and expanding from there.

He said Hydratac is a portmanteau of “Hydra Tactical”, “Hydra” for short.

The first product will be a PC consumer release later this year that’s built on a proprietary, battle-tested frontend+backend (hence the speed to market), and the team already incorporating specs from the military for their use cases – which will further enhance what players get to experience.

“That flywheel effect was a huge multiplier for us at my last venture funded / cofounded startup
Cape (backed by NEA, Google, others) and acquired by Motorola Solutions (www.cape.com),
where we gave players on PC the ability to fly and dogfight real drones (virtual weapons) around
the world with near-zero latency camera and control, and then gave the same capability to our
military and police customers,” Gresham said.

Dan Bunting is an investor at 1am Gaming and board member at Hydratec.

Origins of Hydratac

The idea that became Hydra came together after initial brainstorming sessions last year with
some of the best minds in military FPS, tactical shooters, hardcore business-to-consumer milsims, and FPS in general, as well as military folks on both the uniformed and private sector sides of the table.

“The immediate enthusiasm and insight from Dan Bunting, former studio head at Treyarch for 20
years of Call of Duty Black Ops titles, who had been waiting for years to see this executed, was
a massive boost,” Gresham said.

Bunting led the investment on behalf of 1am in his capacity as venture partner, and serves on the board. Essentially, Gresham and Bunting switched jobs. In an interview, Bunting said after learning so much working for one studio, he wants to share some of his experience as a VC and adviser to lots of gaming entrepreneurs.

“This would not have been possible without the incredible support of my 1am cofounders Gregory Milken, whom I joined at March Capital to kick off our very first gaming fund in Q4 2019, and Francisco Liquido (also cofounder of my first company way back in 2004) who spun out 1am Gaming VC as its own firm with us in Q2 2023; founder Par Chadha and the whole crew at HGM Fund, whose holdings span over $B in revenue, 15K employees, and over 20 countries; and the legion of others who devoted their expertise, mentorship, and support to getting us off the ground,” Gresham said.

More details about the game will be coming later. Since it’s a new company, the team has thought about AI, but it isn’t yet implementing anything that could be considered a transformative AI tool.

“AI, is just not quite there yet for our purposes,” Gresham said. “There are interesting things. Dan and I talked about early last year about the the fact that AI can interpolate voice well,. Actually being able to give commands to squad mates — that’s interesting. It’s not something that we’re going to implement anytime soon because of the compute issues, but that is interesting.”