10 Best Game Makers That No Longer Exist and It Makes Us Sad

doesn't I feel that sometimes now games feel very different from games that we had like ten years ago maybe it has to do with the fact that a lot of the studios that made those games just aren't around anymore today in game rings here are 10 great game studios that don't exist anymore so on an awful number 10 do you remember pandemic studios the team behind the og Star Wars Battlefront games they also went on to make mercenaries and Destroy All Humans both of which were actually pretty good games they also made full-spectrum warrior which was a really cool military strategy game where you don't actually control the soldiers but it's more like XCOM it was actually a lot of fun on October 11th 2007 it was announced that pandemic along with Bioware were being acquired by EA and on November 17 2009 pandemic was officially closed down resulting in 228 people losing their jobs 35 pandemic employees were sent to work at EA Los Angeles to work on other projects one of those being mercenaries Inc which would later be cancelled currently a lot of these X pandemic employees now work at other Studios like respawn 343 and Infinity Ward so it's cool to see them find work elsewhere they definitely deserve it they all put out some very fun good quality games moving on to number 9 Westwood Studios was founded in 1985 by Brett Sperry and Lewis castle as Westwood associates westwoods early work consisted of contract gigs for companies like strategic simulations incorporated importing 8-bit games to 16-bit systems with the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST from there the company used the funds to expand its team to develop its own games in-house with the company's first original title being an RPG developed for EA in 1988 called Mars saga from there the company developed a video game adaption of the classic tabletop strategy game battle tech with the release of the RTS battle tech of the Crescent Hawks revenge which is credited for laying a lot of the foundations for many RTS titles going forward in 1991 the company saw a great deal of success with its D&D RPG eye of the beholder which is developed for strategic simulations incorporated in 1992 Westwood Studios was acquired by virgin interactive under which to produce hit titles like 1994 is the Lion King Blade Runner in 1997 June 2019 98 and a total of 12 games under the command & Conquer banner from 1995 to 2002 amid all this ei acquired the studio as part of a hundred and twenty two point five million dollar deal in a 2003 EA close the studios during a consolidation which led to significant layoffs and personnel reshuffling with some of the former employees being shifted to EA Redwood Shores and EA Pacific while others went on to form petroglyph games in 2003 and that number eight hunting soft limited was found in May 1973 by brothers Yugi and Hiroshi Kudo early Hudson soft strongly favored quantity over quality and at one point we're putting out up to thirty titles a month which wasn't working out particularly well for them so in 1983 they flipped the script and started to focus on quality eventually becoming Nintendo's first third-party software vendor for the Famicom the company's first game under that partnership loadrunner sold 1.2 million units hudson continued to make games for the famicom as well as other platforms at the ZX Spectrum and MSX and was eventually reorganized as Hudson soft Company Limited in July 1985 the same year the company released another hit Bomberman the following year saw the company doubling down on their hit franchises like Bomberman and continuing to make games for Nintendo eventually developing the first three mario party games for the n64 well Nintendo one husband soft had a long-standing partnership the company had also been involved with Konami going back all the way to 1985 but that relationship eventually led to a full-on acquisition starting in 2001 after husband soft was heavily impacted by the collapse of its primary bank and entered the stock market in 2000 surely after Konami bought a whopping 5.6 million shares in the company eventually Konami became the primary shareholder and parent company as happens with many companies like Hudson soft they quietly blipped out of existence when it was fully merged into Konami Digital Entertainment on March 1st 2012 after an agreement by the two companies in a board meeting to consolidate into a single entity next up at number 7 we have Midway who was found in 1958 and started publishing and developing arcade games in 1973 they're actually the ones responsible for publishing space invaders Midway was very active and very successful in producing arcade games up until 2001 when due to financial loss as they shut down at the arcade division at this point that they started buying up indie Studios to focus on releasing games for home consoles putting out games like Spy Hunter more a combat wheelman the suffering and others in 2006 things weren't looking too great for Midway and they began to lose money fast then in 2008 they filed for bankruptcy Warner Brothers eventually stepped in in 2009 and gained most of the remaining company assets including the rights of mortal combat from here until 2011 Midway was closing studios and selling stuff off left and right it's kind of sad to see Midway disappear they were a big name in the arcade game scene and they just couldn't keep up with the times other older publishers I Capcom and Sega managed to stay relevant post arcades Capcom is still super successful and ii still finds great success with games like Yakuza x changed and Midway just wasn't able to keep up unfortunately moving on to number 6 Sierra entertainment was founded in 1977 in Simi Valley California by Ken and Roberta Williams originally I as online systems with the intention of evolving adventure games from the text-only experiences that were the norm at the time the company rebranded to Sierra online in 1982 in 1983 the company was hired by IBM to create a game for its new PC jr. the duo set out to make a 3d perspective fantasy adventure and in 1984 King's Quest released a near universal acclaim kicking off the franchise the years following saw the release of several now iconic adventure games such as police quest Leisure Suit Larry and quest for glory by the mid-90s the company had grown drastically now having five largely autonomous developed divisions working on different projects and by 1995 the company would be the market leader in PC gaming the same year sierra released its biggest project yet phantasmagoria which sold nearly 1 million copies despite mixed reviews in 1996 Sierra was bought by ecommerce companies CUC international in November of that same year Ken Williams met with valve Softworks and negotiated Sierra's exclusive rights to published half-life which was debuted by Ken Williams at e3 1997 after a series of mergers the company saw a major reorganization resulting in the shutdown of various development studios and the relocation of key projects as well as layoffs for around 250 employees Sierra continued to publish games into two eight when the vendee merged with Activision in the great Activision Blizzard merger moving ownership of ceará and its properties to Activision surely after Sierra was closed and considered for possible future sale on July 29 2008 Activision killed several Sierra titles they saw weren't fit for its long term strategy and many of the former plan titles sold off to other publishers this was the end of Sierra as we knew it in 2014 however Activision planned a revival for the Sierra named releasing games like King's Quest and geometry wars three dimensions under the revived banner moving on to number five we have never solved founded in 1994 by former employees of Malibu Interactive in Westlake Village California the studio had issues with funding even back then with the studio about to run out of money in January 1998 after work on the PlayStation port of the PC game MDK before the studio went under however Activision came into the picture wanting the studio to redevelop a Bruce Willis voice project called apocalypse with working apocalypse going well activision contract and Neversoft to develop a skateboarding game by the end of 1998 the 16 person studio was in full swing with development of the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater between 1999 and 2007 the students developed 9 games in the series and in that time the studio grew from 16 to over 150 people they worked on other things in that time at the 2005 Western gun which was developed alongside B NOx and rebellion developments but for the most part it was all Tony Hawk all the time up to 2006 when Activision acquired the rights to the Guitar Hero franchise and chose Neversoft to be the developer for the series the studio put out 7 titles under the Guitar Hero banner eight if you count 2009 s band hero with their inaugural titled 2007 s Guitar Hero 3 legends of rock breaking several records and garnering a fair bit of good press and acclaim in 2010 the franchise was handed over to Vicarious Visions and in February 2010 the studio was hit with a 50 employee layoffs the studio was eventually being merged with Col Julia developer Infinity Ward in May 2014 shortly after on July 10th 2014 exactly 20 years of the day of the studio's founding Neversoft was officially made defunct with the remaining employees burning a sculpture of the studios I can't excuse I've all in effigy coming into number four we have a clean entertainment in March 1987 former Activision employee Greg fish back sales guy Jim score Polsky and partner Robert Holmes formed a claim entertainment in Glen Cove New York in an effort to get back into the games business after branching out into other endeavors in the years to follow the company produce a bunch of products based on licenses from popular TV shows movies and comic books professional wrestling games under the WUF license as well as many of the ports of Midway arcade games like Mortal Kombat the company also published games for several other companies who at the time didn't have American publishing arms such as Tito's bust-a-move and techno Japan's Double Dragon to the 1990s were especially good for acclaim with the company becoming one of the biggest and most successful publishers of console games seeing a 585 million dollar profit in 1995 come 2004 however things got a bit dicey for the publisher financial woes due to poor sales resulted in the closure of two of the acclaimed studios the company also filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and actually left a bunch of employees unpaid which I mean come on dick move a claim on August 20th 2004 the company's agreement with a claims primary lender expired and a week later the company closed all of its facilities next up number three we have LucasArts you all know LucasArts they made most of the Star Wars games that we've all grown to love games like Super Star Wars dark forces Jenny outcasts and masters of teras kasi the secret best Star Wars game they also put out Indiana Jones titles and some others but Star Wars was the bulk of what they put out LucasArts were also the ones working on that dope looking Star Wars 1313 game that was pretty much like an uncharted Star Wars game where you were supposed to be going to be playing as a young Boba Fett on October 30th 2012 LucasArts was acquired by Disney and it was business as usual until April 3rd 2013 when was announced that LucasArts would no longer make games but instead would keep a small team to work as a licensure and that all games would be either licensed out to third-party developers or handed off the Disney Interactive Studios which actually led to EA making Star Wars games which they've kind of shown us wasn't the best move anyway just like that no more LucasArts Gamze Star Wars 1313 was unfortunately cancelled and so are three other unannounced games that they were working on next number two this one is pretty recent and the wound is still fresh telltale games closed their doors and filed for bankruptcy in November 2018 I'm sure you've all heard of telltale games whether it be from all the news coverage of them closing or from one of their games Walking Dead wolf among us Batman there's a ton on September 21st 2018 telltale CEO Pete Hawley announced that the studio is being hit with a majority studio closure 90% of their employees were let go that day with the skeleton crew kept on to finish up some stuff this happened pretty soon after the release of the first episode of the last season of The Walking Dead according to reports employees were pretty much blindsided by this and that day we're giving only 30 minutes to gather their belongings and vacate the premises their ex employees were not treated well at all during all this and many of them took to social media to out tell tale about the suddenness of the closure about health benefits being lost very very messy stuff Skybound Entertainment eventually acquired the rights to the Walking Dead and will finish the season with employees from the now-defunct telltale games so these people get some more work and they get to finish to tell their story it's not always lost but still this is a super shitty situation finally at number one visceral games originally known as EA Redwood Shores was an EA own studio you probably know them as a team behind dead space that game was so successful it actually led to Redwood Shores rebranding themselves as visceral games as versatile they went on to make and release both Dead Space 2 & 3 and Dante's Inferno in 2013 EA hired Amy Hennig to write the story for Yuma which was set to be a pirate game but after the announcement of Assassin's Creed Black Flag the game was cancelled in favor of a Star Wars game this game was still going to have a piratey vibe just within the Star Wars universe and after the release of battlefield harline in 2015 which would actually be the last game that visceral released the team was split into two half working on hardline DLC and the other entering pre-production for this new Star Wars game going by project ragtag this game had you playing as criminals where you would control multiple characters take on various jobs all leading up to a big heist in April 2017 visceral showed their demo got the green light to continue production but months later in October of that year ei just days after seeing a second demo and now they were closing down Visceral Games the game was reassigned to EA worldwide studios and rumor has it that the games they were making out of it is very different it was originally set to be a story heavy linear experience but was then turned into an open-world experience instead this was a huge bummer Annie Henning had originally worked on the Uncharted series so people were pretty excited to see what she could do with the Star Wars title it's sad to see what happened to her game hopefully whatever comes out of the ashes is able to avoid controversy like we had with battlefront - and those are ten great game studios that don't exist anymore but we want to hear from you so meet us down in the comments and let us know what you think as I'm sure you Rea know hit that like button really helps us out and if you're new here subscribing is a good idea because we put up videos like this every single day as always thank you for stopping by to hang out with us we really appreciate it and we'll see you next time right here on game ranks

Channel: gameranx

Views: 516,102

Rating: 4.9184237 out of 5

Keywords: game makers, dead games, dead game makers, dead game studios, top 10 game studios, best game studios, old game studios, akklaim, gameranx, top 10 gaming, top 10 games, top 10 game makers, gaming, old games, classic game studios, classic gaming

Id: ainXUzmPsHo

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018