There are quite a few game studios that never survived the endless ebb and flow of this industry, and don’t exist anymore, at least in the way they used to.
This can be due to the company going bankrupt, their parent company laying off the entire studio, or the studio being Ship of Theseus’d into an entirely different thing.
Phil Spencer Announces Massive Layoff At Xbox Via Internal Memo
Following the recent trend in the gaming industry, Microsoft has once again announced massive layoffs of 650 employees at Xbox
These companies are some of the most influential, and nowadays the people within them have moved onto different teams, or are no longer working in the games industry.
Today we mourn the loss of some of the teams of developers that created influential, great, or a ton of different, iconic titles, and still managed to meet an unfortunate end.
Diamonds in the Rough
If you’re anything like me, you probably remember seeing theTHQlogo on a ton of your games growing up, which didn’t mean much, as their output was extremely variable.
They were a prolific publisher of just about anything until around 2012, when the uDraw tablets they were making flopped incredibly hard, leading them to bankruptcy.
Before this, they published great stuff like Drawn to Life,You Don’t Know Jack,Saints Row,S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and a myriad of licensed games, but those didn’t keep them afloat.
After liquidating and selling off all their assets, the THQ name got picked up by Nordic Games,which now calls itself THQ Nordic, despite sharing very little in common with the original THQ studio aside from their IPs.
Brand Name Hot Potato
Atariwas one of the first and most well-known video game creators, but you might not know that the Atari brand has been bouncing around different companies since 1984.
The Atari that made the 2600, made a garbage version ofPac-Man, and nearly killed the video games industry, went under in 1985 and changed hands several times.
10 Best Atari 7800 Games, Ranked
The forgotten younger brother of the Atari lineage boasts an impressive library of titles. This list breaks down the best games on the system.
The most notable change of hands was to Infogrames Entertainment around 2001, which made them use the brand for throwback consoles, compilations, and other nostalgic cash grabs.
From there, the Atari name went to a multitude of other studios, but the point is that it’s nothing like the original, and the brand name is barely ever used by whoever owns it nowadays.
8Sierra On-Line
Slowly Fizzled Out
Sierra On-Line, or Sierra Entertainment, was known for making some classics likeKing’s Questand Frogger, as well as publishingHalf-Life,Crash Tag Team Racing, and a few hundred other games.
They had a ton of closures, layoffs, cuts, and eventually their parent company, Vivendi, decided that the lack of money coming in meant more layoffs and more divisions being axed entirely.
Sierra was essentially remade in 2005, and they had some success on the 7th generation of consoles with TimeShift, but when Vivendi merged with Activision, Sierra pretty much died with it.
From there, most of their trademarks were sold off, and though Microsoft still owns the Sierra name, it’s incredibly unlikely we’ll ever see anything from them again.
7AlphaDream
Died With The 3DS
AlphaDreamwas one of the highest-quality, extremely specialized studios. It almost exclusively worked on the Mario and Luigi series with Nintendo and did not do much else.
This lack of diversity meant that they were in trouble when Mario & Luigi Paper Jam was reviewed poorly, and the Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga remake sold worse.
They decided to remakeMario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Storyon the 3DS, but it was too little, too late. It came out two years after the Switch launched on a console where you could already play the original.
This game became one of the worst-selling Mario games ever made, and decidedly killed the company, with AlphaDream declaring bankruptcy later that same year.
6Arkane Austin
A Recent Tragedy
Arkane Austinhad one of the greatest track records in the industry, starting as a small independent company, before being bought by ZeniMax in 2010, with ZeniMax being bought by Microsoft in 2021.
The developers of great titles likeDishonored,Prey,Wolfenstein: Youngblood, andDeathloopnow had to contend with even more corporate oversight, which doesn’t tend to go well.
Redfallwas a 2023 title that did incredibly poorly, and Microsoft had a round of laying off and dissolving several studios soon after, including Arkane Austin in the chaos.
It was an abrupt end, with developers still working on content for Redfall before getting an email memo saying that the entire studio was now closing for good, and it was quite sad to see.
5Hudson Soft
Lost To Time
The creators ofMario Party,Bomberman, and a few hundred other classics,Hudson Soft, started falling off in the mid-2000s, due to several key figures leaving the company.
With financial losses in 2004, the creator of Bomberman left in 2006, and most of the workforce resigned or migrated to Nintendo’s NDcube division in 2011.
Around this same time, Hudson Soft had been getting pretty close to Konami, with Konami acting as their main publisher, and in 2011, they became a full-on subsidiary.
In 2012, the companies mutually agreed on a merger, which essentially resulted in Hudson Soft being no more, most of its workforce dissolved, and Bomberman now being a neglected Konami IP.
4Telltale Games
Stretched Too Thin
Telltaleis the creator of the iconicWalking Deadgames, as well as other choose-your-own-adventure style narrative games likeMinecraft Story ModeorTales from the Borderlands.
They got incredibly deep in this niche, though, and most games they releasedweren’t incredibly successfulaside from The Walking Dead, and the studio started failing around 2018.
90% of TellTale employees were gone by September, with most staff members being abruptly told to collect their stuff and leave within 30 minutes of being told the company was no more.
Only 25 staff members remained, forming a skeleton crew to finish up the last few projects, while Skybound eventually took over the Walking Dead franchise, with Telltale dissolved.
3Neversoft
Neversoftwere the developers of theGuitar Heroseries,Tony Hawkgames, and Gun, and ended up helping out with quite a fewCall of Dutygames in the early 2010s.
They were split into two around 2004, and this division ended up with them spreading too thin and getting middling reviews on Gun and the later Guitar Hero games.
Neversoft Says Goodbye by Burning an Effigy of its Logo
Around 2010, 50 employees had been laid off, with the remaining teams pretty much exclusively working on Call of Duty, until Activision chose to merge the remaining team at Neversoft with Infinity Ward.
This meant by 2014, the company had been officially dissolved, and the remaining few employees burned down a sculpture of their company logo, fitting for the name Neversoft, as that goes hard.
Sold and Sued
Creators of numerous arcade classics, especiallyTron,Mortal Kombat, andKiller Instinct,Midwaywas incredibly prolific throughout the 80s and up through the early 2000s.
Right around the middle of the decade, though, Midway ran into some really hard times financially, reporting millions in losses on sales and quite a large debt racking up.
Throughout 2009, Midway filed for bankruptcy, selling off studios, and eventually havingtheir assets acquired by Warner Bros., but this didn’t go as smoothly as expected.
Numerous claims of misleading shareholders, fraud, and breaches of contract came up against the slowly dying company and meant any chance of seeing Midway again swiftly vanished.
1Japan Studio
Axed Before Their Time
Perhaps one of the greatest losses of this decade,Japan Studiowas the first party team at Sony responsible forShadow of the Colossus,Ape Escape,Bloodborne, and more incredible titles.
After the Bloodborne remake, this team found themselves with very little work, as Sony had decided not to renew the contracts of several studios,one of which being Japan Studio.
Sony saw Japan Studio as too stuck in the past and unable to deliver incredibly successful titles, and they cut a large portion of that workforce and moved a few lucky staff members over to Team Asobi.
Sony essentially cut almost all of their internal dev teams aside from Team Asobi, which unfortunately means the massive team behind some of themost revolutionary games of all timeis no more.
Dualshockers Definitives: Best Platformers of 2024
2024 has been a pretty weird year for platformers, but these ten games shine through.
