Companies & Studios

The name Scott Miller and George Broussard's Apogee Software gave its 3D games in 1994, and the whole company's name from 1996. It made Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior on Ken Silverman's Build engine, backed Prey and Max Payne, and spent from 1997 to 2009 on Duke Nukem Forever, which Gearbox finished in 2011. Sold in 2014, it now publishes retro-style shooters.

Three former Activision men founded Acclaim on Long Island in 1987 to sell games for the NES. It grew on film, sport and wrestling licences and the home versions of Midway's Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, bought LJN, Mirrorsoft's games and the studios Probe, Iguana and Sculptured, nearly collapsed in 1996, recovered with Turok, and was liquidated in September 2004, after its publicity stunts of 2002 failed to lift sales. The name has since been bought and revived twice.

Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, two of Activision's founders, started Accolade in California in December 1984. It made its name with HardBall!, Test Drive and other sports and driving games, then reverse-engineered the Mega Drive to publish cartridges without Sega's licence. Sega sued; in October 1992 an appeals court ruled that taking a program apart to learn how to work with it can be fair use. Infogrames bought Accolade in 1999.

Simon Armstrong and Mark Sibly's company in Auckland, New Zealand. From an office in St Kevins Arcade it sold Blitz Basic 2, the compiled BASIC for the Amiga, from 1992, and published games written with it, among them Skidmarks, Guardian and Super Skidmarks. In Britain its games reached the shops through Mindscape and later Guildhall Leisure.

Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry's Cambridge company made the Atom, won the contract to build the BBC Micro, and floated on the stock market in 1983. The Electron and an American venture nearly broke it, and Olivetti took control in 1985. Its engineers Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed a 32-bit processor, the ARM, for the Archimedes; the processor team became ARM Ltd in 1990. Acorn closed its computer business in 1998 and was broken up in 1999.

Acorn Computers' software company, run from Cambridge by David Johnson-Davies. It sold programs for the Atom, then games, languages and business software for the BBC Micro and Electron, and published Elite in 1984. In 1986 Acorn folded it back into the parent company, and Superior Software took over the Acornsoft games label.

Founded in 1979 by four of Atari's VCS designers and Jim Levy, Activision was the first company to sell its own cartridges for Atari's console, and it put its designers' names on the box. It made Pitfall! and Ghostbusters, moved from cartridges to home computers, bought Infocom, and by 1990, renamed Mediagenic, was losing millions. Under Robert Kotick it came through bankruptcy, bought the studios behind Call of Duty and Guitar Hero, merged with Vivendi Games as Activision Blizzard in 2008, and was bought by Microsoft in 2023.

Kevin Toms's company, set up to sell Football Manager. It advertised by mail order from Milton Keynes in February 1982, moved to Bournemouth by the end of 1983 and sold the game in WH Smith. Prism Leisure bought it in 1987 and kept Addictive as a label into the 1990s, for Football Manager 2, its sequels and other games.

Brothers Mike and Tim Mahoney, who ran a Sheffield computer shop, started Alligata in 1983 to sell games by two young programmers, Tony Crowther and Steve Evans. It published Blagger and Loco on the Commodore 64, ran into Elite's lawyers over Who Dares Wins and Bombo, licensed Spanish games, and was taken over by Superior Software in 1988.

Roger Hulley's Alternative Software began in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, in 1985, reissuing other companies' games at £1.99 and making its own. It built its range on children's television licences such as Postman Pat, Count Duckula and Thomas the Tank Engine, duplicated its own tapes, survived the end of the 8-bit market and a fire in 1997, and moved on to CD-ROMs and rugby games. Hulley still runs it.

U.S. Gold launched Americana in spring 1986 to sell older American Commodore 64 and Atari games, and some new ones, at £2.99. Its first Commodore 64 batch won three budget Sizzlers in one issue of ZZAP!64, while its Spectrum games mostly disappointed CRASH. By autumn 1987 the label had passed to Mastertronic, which kept it going with reissues such as Bruce Lee.

Anco Software was a Kent publisher run by Anil Gupta. It sold Commodore 16, Plus/4 and Commodore 64 games in the mid-1980s, then published Dino Dini's Kick Off (1989), Player Manager (1990) and Kick Off 2 (1990). After Dini left for Virgin in 1993, Anco kept the Kick Off name and carried the series on with Kick Off 3 (1994) and later PC games, and it closed in 2003.

Ape was the Tokyo company that made Shigesato Itoi's Mother role-playing games with him: Mother for the Famicom in 1989 and, with HAL Laboratory, Mother 2 for the Super Famicom in 1994, released in America as EarthBound. It also wrote guidebooks to video games and co-developed Mario's Picross. Tsunekazu Ishihara, who worked there, founded Creatures Inc. in 1995, and later accounts treat Creatures as Ape's successor.

Scott Miller's company in Garland, Texas, which from 1987 sold shareware games by giving away the first part of a series and selling the rest. It published id Software's Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, made Duke Nukem, and from 1994 put its 3D games out under the name 3D Realms, which soon replaced Apogee altogether.

Jez San began trading as Argonaut in 1982, as a teenager. His Starglider (Rainbird, 1986) made the name, 3D on the Game Boy brought Nintendo, and Argonaut designed the Super FX chip that powered Star Fox. It went on to Croc, spun off its chip business as ARC, and collapsed into administration in 2004. San revived the name as a publisher in 2024.

Ariolasoft was the games business of Ariola, the Bertelsmann record company. Its British arm opened at the end of 1984 with American games from Electronic Arts and Broderbund, then commissioned British and European games of its own, among them Golf, programmed in Budapest. Electronic Arts left in 1987 and the British arm did not last; the German company was sold to its manager in 1990 and renamed United Software.

Raphaël Colantonio founded Arkane Studios in Lyon in 1999 to make first-person RPGs in the line of Ultima Underworld. Its first game, Arx Fatalis (2002), was a rough but admired cult success; Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (2006) used Valve's Source engine. ZeniMax bought the studio in 2010, and Arkane went on to make Dishonored (2012), Prey (2017) and Deathloop (2021). Its Austin studio closed in 2024; Arkane Lyon carries on. In 2011 Arkane released the source code of Arx Fatalis under the GPL.

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in 1972. It made Pong, sold itself to Warner in 1976, turned the VCS into the console that defined home video games in North America, and collapsed in the 1983 crash. In 1984 it split in two: Warner kept the arcade business and sold the home business to Jack Tramiel, whose Atari Corporation made the ST, Lynx and Jaguar before merging with the disk drive maker JTS in 1996.

When Warner sold Atari's home business to Jack Tramiel in 1984, it kept the coin-op division, which became Atari Games. Owned by Namco, then by Warner and its own managers, it made Gauntlet, Paperboy and Hard Drivin', and through its Tengen label went to court with Nintendo over the NES lockout chip and Tetris. WMS Industries bought it in 1996; renamed Midway Games West, it closed in 2003.

Atarisoft was Atari Inc.’s cross-platform software label, introduced in 1983. It sold arcade conversions for rival computers and consoles, combining Atari games with licensed works from Namco, Nintendo and Williams. Its advertisements make the distinction between a publisher, an arcade creator and a particular machine’s version visible.

Atlantis Software was set up in London in January 1984 by Michael Cole and Rodger Coghill, whose other business distributed horror films on video. It followed Mastertronic into £1.99 games in the spring of 1984, and its catalogue mixed arcade games with card and board games: David Simon's Eights won CRASH readers' vote for best card or puzzle game of 1984. Atlantis was still publishing budget games, and supplying magazine cover tapes, in the early 1990s.

A Tokyo company founded in 1986 that began by developing games for other publishers and became known for Megami Tensei, role-playing games in modern Tokyo where the player talks to demons and recruits them. Its Persona spin-off, from 1996, grew into its best-known series. After passing through Takara and Index, Atlus was bought by Sega Sammy in 2013, and Persona 5 and its Royal edition had sold more than ten million copies by 2025.

Audiogenic started in Reading around 1979 copying tapes for the Commodore PET, then imported American VIC-20 games. In 1985 Peter Calver's Supersoft took it over, and from Harrow the new Audiogenic Software made Graham Gooch's Test Cricket, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer, Loopz and a run of cricket and rugby games that lasted into the late 1990s.

Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen's development studio in Melbourne, Australia, founded in 1980. It wrote The Hobbit and The Way of the Exploding Fist for its sister company Melbourne House, kept going when the publishing side was sold to Mastertronic in 1987, and spent the next decade making NES, Super NES and Game Boy games for other publishers, Shadowrun among them. It revived the Melbourne House name in 1997, was bought by Infogrames in 1999, and as Atari Melbourne House and then Krome Studios Melbourne lasted until 2010.

Beau-Jolly, a London company with links to the record business, bought most of Imagine's games just before Imagine collapsed in 1984 and spent the next decade selling compilations of other publishers' games: Mega Hits, the Computer Hits and Five Star series, and on the Amiga Power Pack, The Greatest and the Beau Jolly Compilation. Its packs reached number one in Acorn User's Electron chart and the top three of the Amiga charts.

The Konami division that made Beatmania in 1997 and then filled Japanese arcades with music games played on turntables, dance mats, guitars, drum kits and giant buttons. Konami named the division and the genre Bemani after its first hit. The games made Konami a fortune at the end of the 1990s and set the pattern for rhythm games everywhere, though only Dance Dance Revolution became a big hit abroad. The division's arcade series are still being updated in Japan.

Bethesda Game Studios is the in-house developer of the Maryland publisher Bethesda Softworks, led by Todd Howard. The team that made Morrowind (2002) under the Bethesda Softworks name went on to make The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield, open worlds that shipped with their own editing tools and were known for their rough edges. It has been part of Microsoft since 2021.

Christopher Weaver's Bethesda Softworks began in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1986 with Gridiron!, an Amiga football game, and sued Electronic Arts over it in 1988. From 1994 The Elder Scrolls made it a role-playing publisher. In 1999 it became part of ZeniMax Media, which took over the Fallout series and id Software and was bought by Microsoft in 2021.

The magazine publisher EMAP set up Beyond in 1983 under Terry Pratt, formerly editor of Computer and Video Games. In three years it published Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge, Denton Designs' Shadowfire and Enigma Force, and Psytron. British Telecom bought it at the turn of 1986, and the label faded inside Telecomsoft.

BioWare was founded in Edmonton, Canada, in 1995 by three newly qualified doctors, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, with a group of young programmers. After the robot combat game Shattered Steel (1996) it made Baldur's Gate (1998) for Interplay's Black Isle label, then Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Electronic Arts bought it in 2007; its two remaining founders retired in 2012, and after Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024) EA cut the studio back to a core team making the next Mass Effect.

Black Isle Studios was the division Interplay set up in Irvine, California, in 1996 to make role-playing games and nothing else. Under Feargus Urquhart it made Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale games, and put its name on BioWare's Baldur's Gate games as publisher. Interplay's debts closed it in December 2003, with a third Fallout unfinished; its staff went on to Obsidian Entertainment and other studios.

Three UCLA graduates started Silicon & Synapse in Irvine, California, in 1991, converting games and making Super Nintendo titles such as The Lost Vikings. Bought by the educational publisher Davidson & Associates and renamed Blizzard Entertainment in 1994, it made Warcraft that year, then Diablo with its free Battle.net service, StarCraft and World of Warcraft. Its owners changed from Davidson to CUC, Cendant, Havas and Vivendi, then Activision Blizzard in 2008 and Microsoft in 2023.

A San Diego studio that began with computer games for Electronic Arts and Disney Software and became one of Sega of America's busiest outside developers on the Mega Drive: Joe Montana's talking football games, World Series Baseball, Jurassic Park, Shadowrun and the two Vectorman games. Public sources date it from 1988 to 2001.

Doug and Gary Carlston started Brøderbund in 1980 to sell Doug's TRS-80 strategy games, and built it into one of the largest American software publishers by publishing other people's programs under their authors' names: Choplifter, Lode Runner, Karateka and Prince of Persia, The Print Shop, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Cyan's Myst. Mergers with Sierra in 1991 and Electronic Arts in 1994 were called off; The Learning Company bought it in 1998, and its name and programs passed through several owners after that.

A Kent publisher that grew out of a Tonbridge Commodore dealer in 1983, expected its pool game Hustler to reach 35,000 copies by the end of 1984, and then published Stephen Crow's Wizard's Lair and Starquake, which made him Programmer of the Year. After Crow moved to Hewson it turned to budget games, and by 1988 its best-known titles were being licensed and reissued by other companies.

Started in May 1980 by two Liverpool University chemistry students who recorded every tape by hand, Bug-Byte sold software for the Acorn Atom, ZX81 and VIC-20 before it published Manic Miner in 1983. Its staff left to found Imagine in 1982 and Software Projects at the turn of 1984. It went into receivership in June 1985, and Argus Press Software kept the name going as a budget label.

Peter Molyneux and Les Edgar formed Bullfrog in Guildford in 1987, out of a business software company called Taurus. Populous (1989) made its name, and in the next eight years it made Powermonger, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper, all published by Electronic Arts. EA bought the company in 1995. Molyneux left in 1997 to found Lionhead, many senior staff left to start studios of their own around Guildford, and Bullfrog moved to EA's offices in Chertsey in 2000 before being merged into EA UK.

Alex Seropian and Jason Jones founded Bungie in Chicago in 1991 and spent its first decade making games for the Apple Macintosh: Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, the Marathon shooters and the Myth strategy games. Microsoft bought it in June 2000 and its Halo became the Xbox's launch game. Independent again from 2007, it made Destiny with Activision, and Sony bought it in 2022.

The brothers Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi made Sega's Shining role-playing games, first at a small Sega-backed studio called Sonic and then at their own company, Camelot, founded in Tokyo in April 1994. After Shining Force III they left Sega, made Everybody's Golf for Sony and then worked for Nintendo: Mario Golf, Mario Tennis and the Game Boy Advance role-playing game Golden Sun. Camelot was still making Mario sports games in 2026.

Kenzo Tsujimoto's Capcom grew out of an Osaka game-machine company set up in 1979 and released its first arcade video game in 1984. British players met it first through Elite's conversions of Commando and Ghosts 'n Goblins, then through U.S. Gold's GO! label, while in Japan and America it became one of Nintendo's first licensees. Street Fighter II, in 1991, became its biggest hit of the period. Resident Evil and Monster Hunter later outsold it, and Tsujimoto still chairs the company.

The Harrogate publisher sold Cassette 50 by mail order and published ACE. Its legal name changed to Artronic Products in 1988, while the Cascade label still appeared in later coverage.

Cavedog was the division of Ron Gilbert's children's-games company Humongous Entertainment that made games for older players. Formed in 1995 near Seattle, it released Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation in 1997, kept it growing with free units on its website, and followed it with two expansions and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. After Taylor left in 1998 its other projects were cancelled, and by 2000 its work had been folded back into Humongous.

Geoff Brown began selling imported Atari cassettes to Currys from his garage in 1982, under the name Softcell. Renamed CentreSoft in early 1983, the business grew into one of Britain's biggest games distributors, financed U.S. Gold, and outlived it: Activision bought it in 1997, and its managers bought it back in 2024.

A Tokyo developer founded in April 1984 by the programmer Koichi Nakamura and four fellow university students. It programmed the first five Dragon Quest games for Enix, then made its own name with the Mystery Dungeon games, beginning with Torneko's Great Adventure in 1993, and with 'sound novels' such as Kamaitachi no Yoru. In April 2012 it merged with Spike to form Spike Chunsoft.

Bob and Phyllis Jacob's Cinemaware, founded in California in 1986, sold its games as 'interactive movies': Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger, It Came from the Desert and Wings mixed strategy, short action scenes and lavish Amiga art borrowed from Hollywood genres. It laid off most of its staff early in 1991 and closed that year. The name was revived in 2000, and its old games have changed hands several times since.

Clickteam is the French company behind Klik & Play, the 1994 Windows program that let people build games by pointing and clicking instead of typing code. François Lionet, author of AMOS, wrote it with Yves Lamoureux; Europress published it in Britain and Maxis in America. The Games Factory, Click & Create, Multimedia Fusion and Jamagic followed, and the event-editor idea is still in Clickteam Fusion.

Climax Entertainment was a small Tokyo developer run by Kan Naito, who had worked on Enix's Dragon Quest series. It helped make Sega's first Shining games, then built Landstalker (1992), Lady Stalker and Dark Savior around an isometric 'quarter view', before turning to the Runabout driving games and Climax Landers (Time Stalkers). A group from the company formed Climax Graphics, which made Blue Stinger. It is not the British developer Climax.

Cloanto began in Udine, Italy, in 1987 to publish Michele Battilana's word processor C1-Text, and made Amiga programs such as Personal Paint and Personal Fonts Maker. In 1997 it licensed the Amiga operating system to create Amiga Forever, an emulator package with legal Kickstart ROMs. It later acquired copyrights in the classic Amiga software and spent years in court with Hyperion over AmigaOS, settled in August 2026.

Richard and David Darling had written a string of hits for Mastertronic before they launched Code Masters with their father Jim in the autumn of 1986. Selling at £1.99, it built its name on the Simulator games and the Oliver twins' Dizzy, designed the Game Genie cheat cartridge, made unlicensed NES games for Camerica, and later became a major racing-game publisher. Electronic Arts bought it in 2021.

Founded in Toronto in 1954 to assemble imported typewriters, Commodore moved into adding machines and calculators, bought the chip maker MOS Technology in 1976 and made the PET, the VIC-20, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Its founder Jack Tramiel left in 1984 after a quarrel with the chairman, Irving Gould, and the company went into liquidation in April 1994.

Compile was founded in Hiroshima in 1982 by Masamitsu Niitani to sell office software. It found its feet porting Sega arcade games, made its name with the fast, hard shoot-'em-ups Zanac, Aleste and M.U.S.H.A., and then had its biggest hit with the puzzle game Puyo Puyo. A failed business program forced it to pledge Puyo Puyo to Sega in 1998, and the company was wound up in 2002 and declared bankrupt in 2003.

An Athens magazine publisher run by Nikos Manousos. It published Computer για Όλους, launched the listings magazine Pixel in October 1983 because a reader questionnaire asked for more programs, and added PC Master, a monthly with a disk for PC owners, in September 1989. Pixel closed in 1996; Computer για Όλους carried on in print, by Wikipedia's account, until 2013.

Core Design was set up in Derby in 1988 by Gremlin Graphics' sales director Jeremy Smith (later Heath-Smith) with the programmers of Gremlin's Derby studio. It made Rick Dangerous, Chuck Rock and Thunderhawk, published its own games from 1990, and was bought by CentreGold in 1994 and so by Eidos in 1996. Its Tomb Raider (1996) introduced Lara Croft. After The Angel of Darkness (2003) Eidos moved the series to Crystal Dynamics; Rebellion bought the studio in 2006 and closed it, as Rebellion Derby, in 2010.

Creatures Inc. was founded in Tokyo in November 1995 by Tsunekazu Ishihara, who had worked at Shigesato Itoi's Ape. It shares the Pokémon copyright with Nintendo and Game Freak, co-founded what became The Pokémon Company in 1998, develops the Pokémon Trading Card Game and makes the 3D models of the Pokémon. Its games include Detective Pikachu Returns (2023).

Criterion Software was formed in Guildford in December 1993 as a Canon subsidiary to sell the RenderWare 3D library, and opened its own game studio in January 1996. That studio made Burnout, the PlayStation 2 racer built around oncoming traffic and crashes. Electronic Arts bought the whole company in 2004; Criterion went on to make Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed games, and in 2025 became one of EA's Battlefield studios.

Computer Rentals Limited, run from London's East End by the teenage Clement Chambers, sold sports games, chased licences from The Magic Roundabout to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, and found its one big hit in Pete Cooke's Tau Ceti. In 1986 it sent Rod Pike's Dracula to the British Board of Film Classification and got a 15 certificate; Jack the Ripper, by St Brides, became the first game rated 18. CRL closed in 1991 and On-Line Entertainment rose from it.

Rand and Robyn Miller formed Cyan in 1987 to make children's programs for the Macintosh in HyperCard, then made Myst (1993) and Riven (1997) for Brøderbund. From Mead, on the edge of Spokane in Washington state, it spent years and millions of dollars on the online Uru, came close to closing in 2005, and has since made Obduction (2016) and Firmament (2023) and remade Myst and Riven.

Founded in Tokyo in 1976, Data East made arcade games for nearly three decades, from BurgerTime (1982) and Karate Champ (1984) to Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja and RoboCop (1988). Its American arm sued Epyx over World Karate Championship and won a recall order in 1987, only for the appeal court to reverse it in 1988. The company was declared bankrupt in 2003, and G-Mode bought most of its games in 2004.

Daze Marketing was set up in London in January 1992 by Richard Hennerley, formerly of Palace Software, to sell, market and publicise other publishers' games in Britain. It launched with the French studio Silmarils' Ishar games, then handled the Finnish Stardust, the German The Patrician and, from late 1994, Impressions' strategy games. It was still trading in 1996.

Delphine Software was set up in Paris in 1988 as the games arm of Paul de Senneville's Delphine record label, the company behind Richard Clayderman. Paul Cuisset led its games, from Future Wars and its Cinématique adventure system to Flashback; it published Éric Chahi's Another World, turned to 3D with Fade to Black, and found a new audience with Moto Racer. It was sold in 2003 and liquidated in 2004.

Five of Imagine's megagame team set up Denton Designs in Liverpool in September 1984 as a co-operative development house. Working for Beyond and Ocean, it made Shadowfire, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Great Escape and Where Time Stood Still. The founders split in 1986, Ally Noble carried on with the staff, and the studio worked into the 1990s before joining Rage.

Design Design began as Crystal Computing, which sold ZX81 games and the Zeus assembler from 1982 and published Halls of the Things in 1983. Renamed in 1984, its programmers, among them Simon Brattel, Neil Mottershead and Graham Stafford, wrote fast 3D games such as Dark Star and Forbidden Planet on computers they had designed themselves, then programmed for Piranha and Domark until the team became Walking Circles in 1987.

Founded in Austin, Texas, in June 2009 by Harry Miller, Rick Stults and Mike Wilson, with Graeme Struthers and Nigel Lowrie, the team behind Gathering of Developers (1998) and Gamecock (2007). Devolver started with high-definition Serious Sam remakes on Steam, broke through with Hotline Miami in 2012, published Enter the Gungeon, Katana Zero and Fall Guys, mocked E3 with a spoof press conference in 2017, and listed on London's AIM market in November 2021.

Digital Illusions, later DICE, was formed in Sweden in 1992 by four members of the demo group The Silents and a fifth partner to sell their Amiga game Pinball Dreams. After Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions it turned to racing games, took over the makers of Codename Eagle, and in 2002 released Battlefield 1942. Electronic Arts bought the whole company in 2006, and DICE, now in Stockholm, still makes Battlefield.

DISMAC began on 25 January 1973 selling imported calculators and by 1981 held most of Brazil's calculator market. In late 1980 it showed the D-8000, a TRS-80 Model I compatible that Micro Sistemas called Brazil's first personal computer, and its commercial director Oscar Alegre made the industry's case for the market reserve in that magazine's first issue. It moved on to Apple II and IBM PC compatibles, business systems and, later, video game clones.

David Jones's Dundee studio wrote Menace and Blood Money for Psygnosis, then Lemmings, which by 1997 had been converted to 21 formats. It worked for Nintendo on the Super NES and N64, made Grand Theft Auto for BMG in 1997, and passed to Gremlin, Infogrames and Take-Two before it became Rockstar North in 2002.

Dominic Wheatley and Mark Strachan left an advertising agency in 1984 to start Domark. Its first game, Eureka!, hid a telephone number worth £25,000; after that it built its name on licences: Bond films, Trivial Pursuit, the Star Wars arcade games and Atari Games coin-ops through Tengen. Eidos bought it in 1995, and in 1996 it became part of Eidos Interactive.

Dragon Data began in 1982 as the computer arm of Mettoy, the maker of Corgi toys, and sold the Dragon 32 from Swansea that August. Mettoy sold it to a consortium in November 1982, and it moved to Port Talbot. After two rescues and the Dragon 64, it called in the receivers in June 1984 with £4–6 million of unsold computers in its warehouse. The Spanish company Eurohard bought its assets and built Dragons in Cáceres.

Robert White's company published Harrier Attack, Saboteur!, Turbo Esprit and Thanatos. Its games business passed to Elite in 1987, while Durell continued in business software.

EA Sports is Electronic Arts' sports label. It began in 1991 as EASN, the Electronic Arts Sports Network, a line of games presented like television sport; after ESPN objected to the name and logo, EA renamed it EA Sports in early 1993. Built on John Madden Football and its console sequels, then NHL Hockey, FIFA and NBA Live, it grew into yearly licensed series, added Ultimate Team in 2009, lost the FIFA licence in 2022 and became one of EA's two divisions in 2023.

Edizioni Hobby S.r.l. of Via della Spiga, Milan, published the Italian Zzap! from May 1986 and The Games Machine from September 1988, both under licence from Newsfield. It took Zzap! in-house in 1988, and in September 1991 both magazines appeared under the name Xenia Edizioni, which a former staff writer described as the same publishing house renamed.

Eidos began in 1990 as a small listed company selling a video-editing system for the Acorn Archimedes. In 1995 it bought Domark and two developers, in 1996 it bought CentreGold with U.S. Gold and Core Design, and within months it was publishing Tomb Raider. It later published Deus Ex, Thief and Hitman, was taken over by SCi in 2005 and by Square Enix in 2009, and its studios passed to Embracer Group in 2022.

Rod Cousens, the former managing director of Quicksilva, launched Electric Dreams in Southampton in September 1985 with Activision's money behind it. It published Sandy White's I, of the Mask, Paul Shirley's Spindizzy, two different games of the film Aliens, and arcade conversions including Tempest, Super Hang-On and R-Type, before Activision folded it back into its own name at the end of the decade.

Founded in 1982 by Trip Hawkins, formerly of Apple, Electronic Arts sold games in album-style covers with their authors' names on them, called its developers artists and gave each one a producer. It was an early, heavy backer of the Amiga, where it published Deluxe Paint and created the IFF file format, reached Britain through Ariolasoft before opening its own office in 1987, and made games for Sega's Mega Drive after reverse-engineering the console. Under Larry Probst and his successors it became the world's biggest games publisher, bought and closed studios from Bullfrog to Westwood, faced the 'EA Spouse' protest over working hours, and in 2026 was taken private in a $55 billion deal.

Formed in 1984 by Steve Wilcox and his father Brian out of Steve's younger brother Richard's first game, Elite Systems of Aldridge, Walsall, won the licences for Commando, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Bomb Jack and Paperboy and was Computer and Video Games' Software House of the Year for 1986. It went on to compilations, budget re-releases, Nintendo consoles and mobile phones, and is still a registered company.

East Midland Allied Press began as a group of local newspapers around Peterborough. From 1981 it published Computer and Video Games, and over the next decade it bought or launched Sinclair User, Commodore User (later CU Amiga), ACE, The One, Mean Machines and Nintendo Magazine System, most of them made in one building in London's Farringdon Lane.

A British publisher set up in 1987 as Empire Software by two former staff of the distributor Microdealer. It had early hits with Gazza's Super Soccer and Pipe Mania, made its name on the Amiga with £34.99 war and flight simulations such as Campaign and Dawn Patrol, published Creative Reality's DreamWeb, and as Empire Interactive went on to Pro-Pinball and FlatOut before going into administration in 2009.

A Tokyo company founded in 1975 that took the name Enix in 1982 and went into games by running a programming contest. Two of its winners, Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura, made Dragon Quest for it in 1986. Enix kept almost no programmers of its own, published the work of outside studios such as Chunsoft, Quintet and tri-Ace, and in 2003 merged with its rival Square to become Square Enix.

Tony and Rick Goodman's Dallas studio hired Bruce Shelley, co-designer of Civilization, in 1995 and made Age of Empires, published by Microsoft in 1997. Age of Empires II, Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III followed. Microsoft bought the studio in 2001 and closed it in 2009, after its Xbox 360 strategy game Halo Wars; its staff went on to found Robot Entertainment, Bonfire and Newtoy.

Tim Sweeney started the company in Potomac, Maryland, in 1991 to sell his shareware game ZZT. As Epic MegaGames it published Jill of the Jungle, Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall; as Epic Games, based in North Carolina from 1998, it made Unreal and licensed its engine across the industry, then built Gears of War, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, and took Apple to court over the App Store.

Jim Connelley and Jon Freeman's Automated Simulations sold its first game in December 1978 and made its name with Temple of Apshai. Renamed Epyx, it published Jumpman, Impossible Mission, the Summer Games series and the Fast Load cartridge. It designed a colour handheld, sold it to Atari in 1989 as the Lynx, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that October.

Europress was the Cheshire publishing group founded by Derek Meakin. Its Database Publications ran computer magazines from Stockport and later Macclesfield, including The Micro User from 1983 and Amiga Computing from 1988; its software arm published Mini Office, Fun School and, as Mandarin, AMOS. In 1991 its new Europress Impact took over CRASH and ZZAP!64 from the wreck of Newsfield. Europress sold eleven magazines to IDG at the end of 1994, and Hasbro bought the software business in 1999.

Eutechnyx was the name Brian and Darren Jobling's Newcastle company took in 1997, ten years after it began as the budget publisher Zeppelin Games. A publishing deal with Infogrames turned it into a racing-game studio: Total Drivin', Le Mans 24 Hours, 007 Racing, Big Mutha Truckers, Ferrari Challenge and NASCAR games followed, and in 2012 the free-to-play Auto Club Revolution. Based latterly in Gateshead, it sold its NASCAR business in 2014 and the company was dissolved in May 2025.

Factor 5 began as a group of young programmers and artists in Cologne who worked for Rainbow Arts. They wrote the Amiga R-Type and the Amiga Turrican games, moved to California in 1996 with LucasArts' backing, and made the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games for Nintendo 64 and GameCube, as well as audio tools for Nintendo's consoles. After the PlayStation 3 game Lair and the collapse of its next publisher, the studio closed in 2009. Julian Eggebrecht announced its return in 2017.

British Telecom set up Firebird in the spring of 1984. Its Silver range sold polished budget games at £2.50 with real screenshots on the box, its Gold range published Elite on the Commodore 64 and Spectrum, and with Rainbird it formed Telecomsoft, which MicroProse bought in 1989.

Flair began in 1991 as the full-price label of the budget house Micro Value, near Newcastle upon Tyne. It published Elvira: The Arcade Game, Trolls and Oscar, and its Oscar and Dangerous Streets went into Commodore's CD32 packs in 1993 and 1994. Amiga Power gave Dangerous Streets 3%.

Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson founded Frictional Games in Sweden in 2007, after a student tech demo grew into Penumbra: Overture, a physics-driven horror game made by four people. Its Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) took away the player's weapons and taught a generation of horror games to make the player hide. SOMA followed in 2015 and Amnesia: Rebirth in 2020, and the studio has released the source code of its first two engines.

FromSoftware was founded in Tokyo in 1986 and made business software before its first game, King's Field, came out for Sony's new PlayStation in Japan in 1994. For the next fifteen years it was best known for the mech series Armored Core. Demon's Souls (2009) and Dark Souls (2011), directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, made its name around the world. Kadokawa bought the company in 2014, Miyazaki became its president the same year, and Elden Ring (2022) had sold more than 30 million copies by 2025.

David Braben founded Frontier Developments in Cambridge in 1994, after five years writing Frontier: Elite II largely alone. Its first big game, Frontier: First Encounters, was released by GameTek in 1995 in a buggy state that led to a lawsuit. The studio found its footing with RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, LostWinds and Kinectimals, funded Elite Dangerous through Kickstarter in 2012, joined the stock market in 2013, and became best known for management games such as Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo and Jurassic World Evolution.

Chris Anderson started Future Publishing in Somerton, Somerset, in 1985 with one magazine, Amstrad Action. Within six years, from offices in Bath, it claimed to sell more computer magazines than any other British publisher, with a title for almost every machine and a disk or tape on almost every cover.

A Finnish company that grew out of Remedy Entertainment in 1997 to develop its Final Reality graphics benchmark, and went on to make 3DMark and PCMark. It traded as MadOnion.com from 1999 to 2002, accused Nvidia of driver cheats on 3DMark03 in 2003 before settling with it, briefly ran a games studio, and was bought by UL in 2014 and renamed UL in 2018.

Lewis Galoob Toys, a family toy company from the San Francisco Bay Area best known for Micro Machines, licensed Code Masters' Game Genie for the United States in 1990. Nintendo kept it off American shelves for a year, but the courts ruled for Galoob in 1991 and 1992, and the Genie sold over a million units. Hasbro bought Galoob in 1998.

Game Freak began as Satoshi Tajiri's hand-written games fanzine and became a company in April 1989. Its first game, Quinty, came out through Namco; it then made games for Sony, Nintendo and Sega before spending six years on Pocket Monsters Red and Green for the Game Boy, released in February 1996. It co-founded what became The Pokémon Company with Nintendo and Creatures in 1998 and still makes the main Pokémon games.

Roy Carter and Greg Follis spent some fifteen years writing business software before they turned to games in 1984. From a third-floor office in Dudley they made Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach and Marsport, which CRASH scored 92%, 97% and 95%, then Heavy on the Magick, which its readers voted the best adventure of 1986. The same year they opened a second label, Faster Than Light, for arcade games.

General Consumer Electronics was a Santa Monica company run by Ed Krakauer, formerly of Mattel's Intellivision business. It sold LCD game watches, then licensed Jay Smith's vector-screen console and launched it as the Vectrex in the autumn of 1982. Milton Bradley owned GCE by the end of that year, and closed it in 1984 when it stopped making the Vectrex.

A family firm in Barry, South Wales, started by a teenage Tim Gilberts in 1982, that published The Quill, The Illustrator and the Professional Adventure Writer: the tools that let hundreds of people with no programming knowledge write and sell their own text adventures, royalty free.

Steve Turner left his job in 1983 to write Spectrum games for Hewson as ST Software, and took on his friend Andrew Braybrook. As Graftgold they wrote Avalon, Paradroid, Uridium and Quazatron, signed to Telecomsoft at the 1987 PCW Show amid a court fight with Hewson, converted Rainbow Islands, and worked on through the 16-bit years until the late 1990s.

In November 1987 Stephen Hall, managing director of Argus Press Software, bought the company from the newspaper and magazine group that owned it and renamed it Grand Slam Entertainments, later Grandslam. It published Terramex, Pac-Land, Pacmania, Espionage and The Hunt for Red October, went into receivership in 1990 when Barclays called in its loans, and reappeared under Hall to publish Amiga and ST games such as Nick Faldo's Golf, Liverpool, Beavers and Bump 'n' Burn into the mid-1990s.

Gremlin Graphics grew out of Just Micro, a computer shop in Sheffield run by Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn. Its first hit, Wanted: Monty Mole, reached the national television news in July 1984. Over fifteen years it published Thing on a Spring, Jack the Nipper, the Lotus racing games, Zool and Actua Soccer, bought DMA Design in 1997 and was taken over by Infogrames in 1999.

HAL Laboratory was founded in Tokyo in 1980. In the 1980s it programmed some of the first Famicom games for Nintendo, made the Eggerland puzzle series and published games in America as HAL America. An expensive failure in the early 1990s left it close to bankruptcy until Nintendo stepped in and Satoru Iwata became president in 1993. In the same years it made Kirby's Dream Land (1992), helped rebuild EarthBound and went on to make Super Smash Bros. (1999). It still makes the Kirby games.

Harmonix Music Systems was founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, who met at MIT's Media Lab, to let people who could not play an instrument make music. After years of commercial failures it built Guitar Hero for RedOctane in 2005, lost the name when Activision bought RedOctane, and answered with Rock Band for MTV, which had bought the studio in 2006. Viacom sold it in 2010; Epic Games bought it in 2021, and it now makes music games inside Fortnite.

Hello Games was founded in Guildford in 2008 by Sean Murray and three colleagues from big-studio development. Its stunt game Joe Danger (2010) was self-published on the PlayStation Network. No Man's Sky, a space game with a procedurally generated universe, was revealed in 2013, launched in 2016 to anger at what players found missing, and was rebuilt through years of free updates. The studio announced Light No Fire in 2023.

Andrew Hewson started Hewson Consultants in 1980 with £500 and a book about the ZX80. By the mid-1980s it was publishing Steve Turner's Spectrum games, Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid and Uridium on the Commodore 64, and later Raffaele Cecco's Exolon and Cybernoid, always under the programmers' own names. Its lead authors left for Telecomsoft in 1987, and the company went into receivership in 1991.

Sega's third arcade research and development department, AM3, made Sega Rally, Crazy Taxi and Virtua Tennis. In 2000 Sega made it a separate company called Hitmaker, under Hisao Oguchi, which went on to Crazy Taxi 2 and 3, Virtua Tennis 2 and the card-driven arcade game World Club Champion Football. Oguchi became Sega's president in 2003, and Hitmaker was folded back into Sega in 2004.

The brothers Yuji and Hiroshi Kudo opened a Sapporo shop in 1973 selling radio equipment and photographs, moved into early computers and tape software, and became one of Nintendo's first two Famicom licensees. Hudson made Bomberman and Adventure Island, designed the chips of NEC's PC Engine, toured Japan with its Caravan shooting contests and developed Mario Party for Nintendo. A bank failure and a stock-market listing left it open to Konami, which bought in from 2001 and absorbed it in 2012.

Founded in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 1 February 1991 by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall, id made Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D for Apogee, then published Doom and Quake itself. It licensed its engines, released their source code, and was bought by ZeniMax Media in 2009 and with it by Microsoft in 2021.

International Data Group grew from Patrick McGovern's 1964 market-research firm and his weekly Computerworld into the world's largest publisher of computer magazines. In 1983 it bought Wayne Green's home-computer titles, and from 1985 it published AmigaWorld. At the end of 1994 it bought eleven Europress magazines, Amiga Computing and Amiga Action among them, and ran them from the same Macclesfield offices as IDG Media. The group was sold to Chinese buyers in 2017 and to Blackstone in 2021.

A Bournemouth magazine publisher set up in 2005 by former Paragon Publishing staff. It bought Retro Gamer from the receivers of Live Publishing that October, took on gamesTM and other former Paragon titles in 2006, and grew to 19 magazines before Future bought it in 2016.

Founded in Liverpool in 1982 by two ex-Bug-Byte men, Mark Butler and Dave Lawson, Imagine grew in eighteen months from a front room to a staff of over a hundred, advertised two 'megagames' it never finished, and was wound up in July 1984 while a BBC crew was filming it. The documentary went out on BBC2 in December 1984; Ocean later bought the Imagine name.

David Lester, a chartered accountant, started Impressions in London as a sideline at the end of the 1980s. After a football licence and some arcade games it turned to strategy, published wargames such as Rorke's Drift and Cohort for the Amiga, ST and PC, and in 1992 released Caesar. The firm moved its headquarters to New England, was bought by Sierra in 1995, and turned Caesar into a city-building series that ran to Emperor in 2002. It closed in 2004; its Caesar programmer Simon Bradbury had already co-founded Firefly Studios and made Stronghold.

Ian Andrew's software house, founded in Reading in August 1983. It began with prize games and the Ket Trilogy, published the Graphic Adventure Creator, and built Freescape, the solid-3D system behind Driller and its successors, before selling the engine as the 3D Construction Kit. Its sister company Dimension International took the technology into virtual reality and became Superscape.

Infocom was founded on 22 June 1979 by ten members of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science to sell Zork, their mainframe adventure, on home computers. A virtual machine let one version of each game run on almost every computer, and the games' parser, writing and boxed extras made the company the best-known name in text adventures. It spent heavily on a business database, Cornerstone, which failed, and Activision bought it in 1986. Activision closed its Cambridge studio in 1989 and kept the name as a label; in 2025 the Zork source code was released under an open-source licence.

Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet founded Infogrames in Lyon in June 1983. It reached British shops in 1986 with detective games and comic-strip adaptations that magazines found baffling and French, made Alone in the Dark in 1992, then bought Ocean, Gremlin, GT Interactive and Hasbro Interactive. In 2003 it renamed itself Atari, and in 2024 the Atari company revived Infogrames as a publishing label.

Ted Price set up Insomniac Games in 1994 with no experience of the games industry. Funded by Universal, it made the first-person shooter Disruptor and then Spyro the Dragon for the PlayStation, followed by a Ratchet & Clank game almost every year on the PlayStation 2, the Resistance shooters and Marvel's Spider-Man. It stayed independent for 25 years before Sony bought it in 2019.

A Kyoto developer whose founding members programmed Famicom games for Nintendo from 1983, under contract through another company, before setting up on their own in December 1986. It made Famicom Wars (1988) and Fire Emblem (1990), worked with Nintendo's R&D1 on Super Metroid, made Paper Mario, Advance Wars and much of the WarioWare series, and has built Nintendo's development tools for every handheld since the Game Boy.

Brian Fargo founded Interplay Productions in southern California in 1983. It wrote adventures for Activision and The Bard's Tale and Wasteland for Electronic Arts, became its own publisher in 1988 with Battle Chess, and in the 1990s published Descent, Fallout and, under its Black Isle label, BioWare's Baldur's Gate. Losses brought in the French publisher Titus, which took control in 2001; Fargo left, Black Isle closed in 2003 and the Fallout series went to Bethesda. Interplay survived as a small company holding its old games.

IO Interactive was set up in Copenhagen in 1998 by the developer Reto-Moto and Nordisk Film, with seven staff and a game engine already written. Its first game, Hitman: Codename 47 (2000), started a series that has run for eight main games. Eidos bought the studio in 2004 and Square Enix took it over with Eidos in 2009; in 2017 IO bought itself out, kept Hitman, and in 2026 released its own James Bond game, 007 First Light.

John Romero and Tom Hall founded Ion Storm in Dallas in 1996 after leaving id Software, with a publishing deal from Eidos and offices at the top of a skyscraper. Its Dallas studio made Dominion, the long-delayed Daikatana and Anachronox, and closed in 2001. Its Austin studio, set up by Warren Spector in 1997, made Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows before Eidos closed it in 2005.

Irem began as IPM, a supplier of arcade machines, and became one of Japan's more inventive arcade makers. Its designers produced Moon Patrol and Kung-Fu Master, and in 1987 R-Type, which reached British homes through Electric Dreams in 1988. Irem stopped making games in 1994; a new company owned by its parent, Nanao, took over its development team in 1997.

Ken Levine, Jonathan Chey and Rob Fermier left Looking Glass in 1997 to start Irrational Games. It made System Shock 2 (1999), Freedom Force (2002), Tribes: Vengeance and SWAT 4, and, after Take-Two bought it in 2006, BioShock (2007) and BioShock Infinite (2013). Levine cut it to about fifteen people in 2014, and in 2017 the small studio took the name Ghost Story Games.

U.S. Gold's budget label, launched in the late summer of 1988 at £2.99 a cassette with Gauntlet and Metrocross. Run at first by two former Mastertronic staff, it re-released games from U.S. Gold and other publishers' back catalogues on the 8-bit machines, moved on to the Amiga and ST at £7.99, added the dearer Kixx XL in 1992, and passed to Eidos with U.S. Gold in 1996.

Kompart UK began as a St Albans mail-order business selling Amstrad CPC software and became, from 1993, the British distributor and publisher for continental developers: Blue Byte's Battle Isle and The Settlers, Max Design's Burntime, and, through its Black Legend label, Croteam's Football Glory. It lost the Blue Byte label early in 1995 and went into voluntary liquidation in 1996.

Kagemasa Kozuki started Konami in Osaka in 1969 renting and repairing jukeboxes. Its early arcade hits reached America as Stern's Scramble and Sega's Frogger, and Britain through Ocean's Imagine label; it then became one of Nintendo's first licensees, formed Ultra to publish more NES games, and made a fortune from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. On the PlayStation it published Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill and Pro Evolution Soccer; it later spread into casino machines, card games and gyms, turned to mobile games in 2015, the year Hideo Kojima left, and has since returned to console remakes.

Krisalis began in 1987 as Teque, a development team founded in South Yorkshire by Tony Kavanagh with the former Gremlin programmers Peter Harrap and Shaun Hollingworth. It converted other publishers' games between machines, from Pac-Mania and Chase HQ to Lemmings on the Acorn Archimedes, and from 1990 published its own, among them Manchester United, Hill Street Blues and Soccer Kid. It carried on into the PlayStation era and closed in 2001.

Level 9 Computing was started in 1981 by the brothers Mike, Nick and Pete Austin. Its own interpreted language, A-code, and aggressive text compression let it fit full-size adventures, from Colossal Adventure to the Silicon Dream and Time and Magik trilogies, into 32K machines. It worked with Rainbird from 1986, left for Mandarin in 1988, wrote its last adventure in 1989 and closed in 1991 after a move into graphical games failed.

Peter Molyneux, Mark Webley, Tim Rance and Steve Jackson founded Lionhead in Guildford in 1997, after Molyneux left Bullfrog. Its first game, Black & White (2001), sold more than two million copies. Satellite studios followed, and with them Fable (2004), The Movies and Black & White 2 (both 2005). Microsoft bought Lionhead in 2006, and it made the Fable series for the Xbox 360 until Microsoft cancelled Fable Legends and closed the studio in 2016.

Jack Friedman's New York toy company made wrestling figures and laser-tag guns before it turned film licences into NES games: Jaws, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The entertainment group MCA bought it in 1985 and sold it to Acclaim in 1990, and Acclaim kept the LJN name on its licensed games into the mid-1990s. Its reputation for poor games was fixed later; the period press was more mixed.

Llamasoft was Jeff Minter's software label, formed in March 1982 and run through the 1980s from his parents' house at 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley, Hampshire. It sold only Minter's own games, by mail order and at computer shows, licensed them to HES in America, and in 1991 gave Llamatron away as shareware for a £5 contribution.

Paul Neurath founded Blue Sky Productions in New Hampshire in 1990. As Looking Glass, after a merger with Ned Lerner's company in 1992, it made Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Flight Unlimited and Thief, games that trusted players to find their own way through a simulated world. It sold well at times but never steadily, and it closed in May 2000.

George Lucas's film company set up a games group in 1982, with money and a publishing deal from Atari. As Lucasfilm Games it made fractal-landscape action games for Atari computers, then built its own scripting system, SCUMM, for Maniac Mansion (1987) and used it for a run of point-and-click adventures, from Monkey Island to Day of the Tentacle, then moved to a new engine for Grim Fandango; its adventures were designed so that players were rarely killed or stranded. Renamed LucasArts in the early 1990s, it turned increasingly to Star Wars games. Disney closed its development studio in 2013, after buying Lucasfilm.

Magnetic Scrolls was set up in London in 1984 by Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers to write adventures for the Sinclair QL. Its first game, The Pawn, became a sensation on the Atari ST in 1986 through Rainbird, and The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption and Fish! followed. It left Telecomsoft when BT sold it, moved to Virgin for Wonderland and its Magnetic Windows system, and stopped publishing in 1992. Its source code was recovered in 2017 and the games have been remastered.

A London publisher of part-works, magazines sold a part a week at the newsagent that build into a set of books. Its computing course INPUT ran to 52 weekly parts in 1984 and 1985 and taught programming on five home computers at once. A plan to give away Imagine Software's games with it collapsed in 1984 and helped bring Imagine down. The company has been part of Singapore's Times Publishing group, reportedly since 1980, and its name now belongs mainly to a publisher of books and school materials in Asia.

David Martin, a chemistry teacher who designed board games, started Martech Games near Eastbourne in 1982. From 1984 it built its catalogue on licences: Eddie Kidd, Brian Jacks, Geoff Capes, Zoids, Samantha Fox, Nigel Mansell and 2000 AD. Zoids took 96% in CRASH, Uchi Mata 36%. The Martech name was gone from new releases by 1990.

Mastertronic began selling games in April 1984 at £1.99, a fraction of the full price, and sold them in newsagents, garages and supermarkets as well as computer shops. It claimed two million sales in its first year, bought Melbourne House in 1987, distributed Sega's consoles in Britain, and became Virgin Mastertronic after Virgin bought into it.

Mastertronic launched MAD at the end of 1985 to sell better games for a pound more than its £1.99 range. It carried David Jones's Spellbound, Knight Tyme and Stormbringer, Binary Design's Amaurote and Jeff Minter's third camel game, and in 1988 became the name of Mastertronic's 16-bit label.

Will Wright and Jeff Braun founded Maxis in 1987 because no publisher would take SimCity, a city simulation with no way to win. It came out in 1989 and made Maxis the home of the 'software toys': SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, SimFarm and SimCity 2000. The company went public in 1995, struggled, and was bought by Electronic Arts in 1997 for about $125 million in stock. Under EA it made The Sims (2000), which overtook Myst as the best-selling PC game, and Spore (2008). EA closed its Emeryville studio in 2015, but the Maxis name lives on at EA as the studio behind The Sims.

The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium was set up in 1973 to bring computing to the state's schools and colleges. It wrote hundreds of educational programs, above all The Oregon Trail, sold them to schools across America and beyond, and became a company. SoftKey bought it in 1995, the year SoftKey took over The Learning Company and adopted its name.

Founded at the start of 2006 by Mark Healey, Alex Evans, Dave Smith and Kareem Ettouney, who had worked together at Lionhead, Media Molecule made LittleBigPlanet (2008), a PlayStation 3 platform game built from the same tools its players used to make their own levels. Sony bought the studio in 2010. It went on to Tearaway (2013) and Dreams (2020), then lost its co-founders and ended live support for Dreams in 2023.

Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen founded Melbourne House as a general publisher in 1977. It turned to home computers, sold British Sinclair owners books by Ian Logan and others from 1981, then published The Hobbit (1982) and The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), both written by the couple's Australian studio, Beam Software. Mastertronic bought the publishing side in February 1987; Beam revived the name in 1997.

Bill Stealey, an ex-Air Force pilot, and Sid Meier, a programmer, founded MicroProse in Maryland in 1982 after an argument over an arcade game. It made its name with flight and submarine simulations, then published Meier's Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. Its British arm bought Telecomsoft in 1989. Spectrum HoloByte took the company over in 1993, Hasbro bought it in 1998 and Infogrames in 2001, and the last MicroProse studio closed in 2003.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen's Micro-Soft began in Albuquerque in 1975 by writing BASIC for the Altair. Its BASIC went on to sit in the ROMs of the Commodore PET, VIC-20 and 64, the TRS-80, the Apple II Plus, the Tandy Color Computer, the Dragon and every MSX machine. MS-DOS for the IBM PC made it the PC's software company, DirectX brought games to Windows, and from 2001 the Xbox made it a console maker and, through Rare, Bethesda and Activision, one of the largest game publishers.

A Chicago-area amusement maker founded in 1958 and owned by Bally from 1969. Midway brought Taito's Space Invaders and Namco's Galaxian and Pac-Man to American arcades, then passed to Williams in 1988 and made Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam. As Midway Games it left the arcade business in 2001, went bankrupt in 2009 and sold Mortal Kombat to Warner Bros.

Mike Meek and Andrew Laurie's Bracknell company sold ZX81 programs and add-ons from 1982, then made the Wally Week arcade adventures that CRASH scored between 88% and 93%. In 1985 it shipped Shadow of the Unicorn with the Mikro-Plus, a plug-in ROM that gave the Spectrum an extra 16K. The game sold poorly, no second Mikro-Plus game followed, and by 1987 Mikro-Gen had been sold to Creative Sparks Distribution.

Logotron's games arm became Millennium in 1990 under Michael Hayward. It named and published Vectordean's James Pond, put Diggers in the CD32's box, made the artificial-life game Creatures, and in 1997 its games team became a Sony studio in Cambridge, where MediEvil was finished.

Founded in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1860, Milton Bradley was a board game company that became one of the busiest electronic toy makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It sold Simon and the programmable Big Trak, the Microvision handheld with interchangeable cartridges from 1979, and, after buying the Vectrex's maker GCE in 1982, the vector-screen console itself, until it stopped production in 1984. Hasbro bought Milton Bradley the same year.

Founded in 1983 by the Australian Roger Buoy as the software arm of the American textbook publisher SFN, Mindscape published Deja Vu, Balance of Power and Paperboy, and in Britain the Amiga games of Tony Crowther, Acid Software and Renegade. It merged with The Software Toolworks in 1990, was bought by Pearson in 1994 and by The Learning Company in 1998, and ended as a French company that left games in 2011.

Mirror Group Newspapers started Mirrorsoft in late 1983 with Mr Men tapes and educational games for the BBC Micro. Under Jim Mackonochie it grew into Dynamite Dan, Strike Force Harrier, the Image Works label, the Bitmap Brothers' Speedball and Xenon 2, and the first Western release of Tetris, whose console rights it lost to Nintendo in 1989. It went into liquidation weeks after Robert Maxwell's death in November 1991, and Acclaim took over what was left.

Markus Persson started Mojang in Stockholm in 2009 to sell Minecraft, and set it up as a company with Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh in 2010. It made the card game Scrolls and published other studios' games, but Minecraft paid for everything. Microsoft bought it for $2.5 billion in 2014; as Mojang Studios it has since made Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Legends.

A Tokyo developer founded on 1 October 1999 by Hirohide Sugiura, Tetsuya Takahashi and other former Square staff, with Namco as its main shareholder. It made the Xenosaga trilogy and Baten Kaitos, became a Nintendo subsidiary in 2007, and has since made the Xenoblade Chronicles series while helping to build many of Nintendo's own games, among them The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Splatoon.

A Pennsylvania calculator-chip maker that launched the 6502 microprocessor at $25 in 1975, was bought by Commodore in 1976, and went on to design and make the chips inside the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.

A Chicago radio company that became a chip maker. Its 6800 of 1974 trained the engineers who left to make the 6502, its 6809 ran the Dragon and the Tandy Color Computer, and its 68000 family ran the Macintosh, the Amiga, the Atari ST and the Mega Drive. It later co-developed the PowerPC with Apple and IBM, and in 2004 spun off its chip business as Freescale.

Masaya Nakamura's amusement company started in 1955 with children's rides, bought Atari's failing Japanese arm in 1974, and made Galaxian, Pac-Man, Pole Position and Xevious. It was one of the first companies Nintendo let make Famicom games, owned Atari Games in the mid-1980s, and later built arcade machines on Sony's PlayStation hardware, which carried Ridge Racer and Tekken into homes. In 2005 it combined with the toy company Bandai. Nakamura died in 2017; Namco's games and arcades carry on under the Bandai Namco name.

NanaOn-Sha is the small Tokyo company the musician Masaya Matsuura set up in 1993. It made PaRappa the Rapper (1996), the PlayStation game the rhythm-action genre grew from, then Um Jammer Lammy and Vib-Ribbon (1999), which built its levels from the player's own CDs. Later it made Mojib-Ribbon, Vib Ripple, Tamagotchi games for Bandai, Major Minor's Majestic March and the Kinect game Haunt.

The Japanese Natsume's action-game lineage and the American publisher's Harvest Moon history belong to distinct companies. Their names, roles and later changes need to be read separately.

Naughty Dog began as JAM Software, two Washington schoolboys selling Apple II games for a few hundred dollars. After a near-bankrupt 3DO fighting game it made Crash Bandicoot for Universal and Sony, joined Sony in 2001, and went on to Jak and Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us from its studio in Santa Monica, California.

Nazca was a small Japanese studio formed by staff from Irem, whose games division had closed. In 1996 it made two games for SNK's Neo Geo, Neo Turf Masters and Metal Slug, and SNK bought the company the same year.

When Midway went bankrupt in 2009, Warner Bros. bought Mortal Kombat and kept the Chicago team that made it. Renamed NetherRealm Studios in April 2010, with Ed Boon as creative director, it rebooted the series in 2011, made the DC Comics fighting games Injustice and Injustice 2, and has made every Mortal Kombat since.

Joel Jewett, Mick West and Chris Ward started Neversoft in Los Angeles in 1994. While rescuing Activision's Bruce Willis game Apocalypse, the team turned a demo into Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (1999), and Activision bought the studio. Neversoft made a Tony Hawk game a year, took over Guitar Hero with Guitar Hero III in 2007, worked on Call of Duty: Ghosts, and was merged into Infinity Ward in 2014.

Newsfield was founded in Ludlow, Shropshire, by Roger Kean and the brothers Oliver and Franco Frey, and grew from a Spectrum mail-order business into the publisher of CRASH (1984), ZZAP!64 (1985), Amtix! (1985), The Games Machine (1987) and a run of other titles. It went into liquidation in the autumn of 1991, and Europress Impact carried CRASH and ZZAP!64 on from the same town.

Tim Jenison started NewTek alone in Topeka, Kansas, after the Amiga appeared in 1985. Its Digi-View digitiser put colour photographs on a home computer's screen in 1986; with Paul Montgomery it then built the Video Toaster, a $1,595 Amiga card that did the work of a rack of broadcast equipment and came with LightWave 3D. NewTek moved to Windows PCs after Commodore's collapse, made the TriCaster live-production system, and was bought by Vizrt in 2019, which retired the NewTek name in 2023.

A Tokyo company founded in March 1981 that opened a computer shop in Tachikawa and was selling its own games within a year. Dragon Slayer (1984), Xanadu (1985), Ys (1987) and Sorcerian (1987) won it a run of Japanese software awards, and the Ys series and the Trails games of The Legend of Heroes keep it going today.

Nintendo made hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto for most of a century before moving into toys, Game & Watch handhelds and the arcade hit Donkey Kong. Its Famicom, sold in the West as the NES, brought home video games back to America after the 1983 crash, and its Game Boy followed in 1989.

Research and Development 1 was the Nintendo department led by Gunpei Yokoi. It grew out of the team behind Nintendo's toys and Game & Watch, and went on to make both hardware and games: Metroid and Kid Icarus on the Famicom, the Game Boy and its first games, and the Virtual Boy. Yokoi left in 1996, and public sources say the department was merged into a new division in 2004.

A small Birmingham company set up in 1984 by the programmer Paul Woakes and the former retailer Bruce Jordan. It sold Woakes's Encounter, licensed his Novaload tape loader across the C64 industry, and published Mercenary (1985), a vector-graphics planet you could fly over, walk through, trade in and steal from. Damocles (1990) and Mercenary III (1992) took the series to the ST and Amiga.

Obsidian Entertainment was founded in Irvine, California, in 2003 by Feargus Urquhart and other senior staff leaving Interplay's Black Isle Studios. For years it made sequels to other studios' games, among them Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, and gained a name for strong writing and buggy launches. Kickstarter paid for its own Pillars of Eternity, and Microsoft bought it in 2018.

Ocean Software grew from a mail-order games company that David Ward and Jon Woods set up in Manchester in 1982 as Spectrum Games. By the mid-1980s it was one of Britain's largest software houses, known for arcade and film licences such as Daley Thompson's Decathlon, RoboCop and Batman, and for publishing originals such as Head Over Heels and Wizball. Infogrames bought it in 1996, and in January 1998 the company was renamed Infogrames United Kingdom.

Paul McKenna's Liverpool company was set up late in 1984 as the development arm of his publishing label Thor. Its first two games, Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood, scored 93% and 94% in CRASH. A deal to make ten games in a year for British Telecom's Telecomsoft followed, the quality fell away, and Odin had closed by 1988.

Richard Garriott, his brother Robert and Chuck Bueche started Origin Systems in 1983 to publish Garriott's Ultima games, beginning in the family garage in Houston. From Austin it made the Ultima series, Chris Roberts's Wing Commander and Ultima Online. Electronic Arts bought it in 1992 for about $35 million, and closed the studio in 2004.

The games arm of the London film and video group Palace began in 1984 with a game of The Evil Dead, programmed by a teenager who hung around its video shop. Pete Stone built it around artists and designers: Steve Brown's Cauldron games and Barbarian, Dan Malone's Antiriad. Barbarian's cover started a public row, West Germany restricted the game, and in 1991 Palace sold the software company to Leisure Holding, owner of Titus.

The games label the book publisher Macmillan launched at the PCW Show in September 1986. In under two years it published Don Priestley's Trap Door games, Design Design's Nosferatu and Rogue Trooper and Delta 4's adventures The Colour of Magic and The Big Sleaze, and signed up 2000 AD characters and Roy of the Rovers. Macmillan closed it in the spring of 1988, before most of those licences had become games.

The budget label Interceptor Micros launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in April 1986: sixteen titles at £1.99, sold on bright packaging. Mostly new games, with some Interceptor reissues, it published the Oliver twins' Killapede and Colin Swinbourne's Joe Blade, added the £2.99 Players Premier range in 1989, and was still releasing games in 1991, after its parent company had gone into receivership.

The Sony studio that makes Gran Turismo. Kazunori Yamauchi's in-house team, credited as Polys on the first game, was set up as Polyphony Digital Inc. on 2 April 1998. Apart from a robot shooter, Omega Boost, and a motorcycle game, Tourist Trophy, it has made Gran Turismo games ever since, from the PlayStation to the PlayStation 5.

Fergus McGovern and Vakis Paraskeva started Probe in 1984 to publish their own games, then turned it into a developer that converted arcade games and film licences for other publishers, from the 8-bit Out Run to the Mega Drive Mortal Kombat. Acclaim bought it in 1995; renamed Acclaim Studios London, the Croydon studio closed in 2000.

Personal Software Services was started in Coventry in November 1981 by two Warwick graduates, Gary Mays and Richard Cockayne, who could not program. It began with ZX81 utilities, found its market with the Wargamers series and Theatre Europe, and put joystick battles inside its strategy games. Mirrorsoft took control in 1987, and PSS carried on as one of its labels until 1991.

Psygnosis grew out of the wreck of Imagine Software in Liverpool in 1984. It published only for 16-bit machines, dressed its games in Roger Dean artwork under an owl logo, and made its name with Barbarian, Shadow of the Beast and DMA Design's Lemmings. Sony bought it in 1993, and its WipEout sold more copies than any other game at the European PlayStation launch. As SCE Studio Liverpool it made WipEout games until Sony closed it in 2012.

Q Entertainment was the Tokyo studio that Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Shuji Utsumi set up in October 2003, after Mizuguchi left Sega. Its first game, Lumines, launched with the PSP in Japan in 2004, and it went on to make Meteos, Every Extend Extra, Rez HD and Child of Eden. Mizuguchi and Utsumi had both left by 2014, and in 2015 the Lumines and Meteos rights were sold on.

Southampton software house started in 1980 by Nick Lambert, who built a memory pack for his own ZX80 and began selling it. With John Hollis he moved on to ZX81 arcade games and hardware add-ons, then to the Spectrum, where Quicksilva published Ant Attack, Games Designer and Bugaboo. It helped found the Guild of Software Houses in 1983 and was bought by Argus Press in 1984, after which its founders left and the label carried on inside Argus.

Rainbird was the full-price label of Telecomsoft, British Telecom's software business, named after Tony Rainbird, who ran it at the start. It began in 1985 with a music program and an art package, then published Starglider, The Pawn and Carrier Command, signed Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9, and lost them both. MicroProse bought it with the rest of Telecomsoft in 1989 and kept the name going into the early 1990s.

Rainbow Arts was a German games label founded in Gütersloh by Marc Alexander Ullrich and sold through the Softgold group. It published Manfred Trenz's Katakis and Turrican and Chris Hülsbeck's music, and had two games pulled in Britain in 1988: The Great Giana Sisters after Nintendo objected, and Katakis after Activision did. The label passed with Softgold to THQ at the end of the 1990s.

Tim and Chris Stamper incorporated Rare Ltd in April 1985, while Ultimate was still selling Spectrum games, and quietly moved their work to Nintendo's console. By 1988 it had seven Nintendo games finished or nearly finished; in the 1990s it made Donkey Kong Country and GoldenEye 007, and Microsoft bought it in 2002.

Ian Oliver, Graeme Baird and Andy Onions founded Realtime in Leeds in May 1984, in the middle of their final exams. Their fast 3D games, 3D Tank Duel, Starstrike and Starstrike II, led to the 8-bit Starglider for Rainbird, then Carrier Command (1988) and Battle Command (1990). Oliver's tools company, Cross Products, grew out of it and was bought by Sega in 1994.

Brothers Jason and Chris Kingsley started Rebellion in Oxford in 1992. Its first big job was Alien Vs Predator for Atari's Jaguar (1994), and PC Zone called its PC Aliens Vs Predator (1999) the scariest game ever. In 2000 it bought the comic 2000 AD; in 2005 it began the Sniper Elite series; in 2006 it bought Core Design, which it ran as Rebellion Derby until 2010. It is still independent and still run by the Kingsleys.

Three veterans of Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, Splinter Cell and Army of Two left their jobs in 2011 to start Red Barrels in Montreal. With a team of about ten and a grant from the Canada Media Fund they made Outlast (2013), a first-person horror game with no way to fight back, then Outlast 2 (2017) and the co-operative The Outlast Trials (2024), all published by the studio itself.

Alex Garden and a group of colleagues, many of them from Electronic Arts' Vancouver studio, set up Relic in 1997. Its first game, Homeworld (1999), put real-time strategy in fully 3D space. THQ bought Relic in 2004, the year of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes followed in 2006. Sega bought the studio at THQ's bankruptcy auction in 2013, and Relic became independent again in 2024.

A Finnish game studio founded in 1995 in Espoo by members of the demo group Future Crew, among them Samuli Syvähuoko. Its shareware racer Death Rally (1996) was followed by Max Payne (2001), whose slow-motion bullet-time made the studio's name, and then by Max Payne 2, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control and Alan Wake 2. Its Final Reality benchmark led to the founding of Futuremark.

Renegade was the publishing label the Bitmap Brothers set up in 1990 with Tom Watson, formerly of Telecomsoft and Mirrorsoft, and the London record company Rhythm King. It promised developers half the profits and their names on the box, and between 1991 and 1995 published Gods, Magic Pockets, The Chaos Engine, Sensible Soccer, Graftgold's Fire & Ice and Uridium 2, and Factor 5's Turrican 3. Warner Interactive Entertainment bought it in the mid-1990s, and by the end of 1995 the Renegade name had been folded into Warner's own.

Jeff Spangenberg set up Retro Studios in Austin in 1998 with Nintendo's backing to make games for its next console. Three of its four first projects were cancelled, and Nintendo bought the company outright in 2002, months before its fourth, Metroid Prime, was released to wide acclaim. Retro went on to make the rest of the Prime trilogy, two Donkey Kong Country games, Metroid Prime Remastered (2023) and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (2025).

Revolution Software was founded in 1990 by Charles Cecil, Tony Warriner, David Sykes and Noirin Carmody, and began in an office in Hull. Its Virtual Theatre system gave Lure of the Temptress characters who lived their own lives, Dave Gibbons drew Beneath a Steel Sky, and Broken Sword became its long-running series. It survived the collapse of the adventure market by closing its studio, porting its games to the iPhone and crowdfunding Broken Sword 5, and it is still making games in York.

A Japanese maker of sensitized paper, cameras and copiers whose semiconductor division built the Famicom's two custom chips: the 2A03 processor with its sound hardware and the 2C02 picture chip. Nintendo won the price it wanted by guaranteeing an order for three million chips.

Rockstar Games was set up in New York in 1998 by Take-Two Interactive, with the brothers Sam and Dan Houser, who had come from BMG Interactive with Grand Theft Auto, among its founders. Take-Two bought DMA Design in 1999, and the label grew into a group of studios, led by Rockstar North in Edinburgh, that made Grand Theft Auto III, Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V. Its games have drawn controversy from Manhunt to Hot Coffee, and so have its working conditions.

In 2002 Take-Two's Edinburgh studio, until then DMA Design, took the name Rockstar North. It has made every main Grand Theft Auto game since Vice City, as well as Manhunt, and GTA V has sold more than 230 million copies. Grand Theft Auto VI is due in November 2026.

Sega grew out of American-run businesses that supplied coin-operated machines to US servicemen in Japan; its name is short for Service Games. It was owned by Gulf+Western from 1969 until a 1984 buyout backed by CSK, led the arcades of the 1980s with Yu Suzuki's moving cabinets, and made home consoles from the SG-1000 in 1983 to the Dreamcast, whose production it announced it would end in January 2001. It then published games for other companies' machines, became part of Sega Sammy Holdings in 2004, bought studios in Britain, North America and France, and took Sonic to the cinema.

AM2 was Sega's second amusement-machine research and development department, the division Yu Suzuki set up in the late 1980s from the team behind Hang-On, Out Run and After Burner. Under that name it took Sega into polygon 3D with Virtua Racing in 1992, then made Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA and Shenmue. It became a separate company, Sega-AM2, in 2001, returned to Sega in 2004 and dropped the AM2 name in 2011.

Seibu Kaihatsu began in 1982 as Seibu Denshi, made a string of arcade games through the 1980s, many of them sold under Taito's name, and in 1990 produced Raiden, the vertical shooter that kept it going. Its last arcade game was Raiden Fighters Jet in 1998; former staff founded MOSS, which has made the Raiden games since Raiden III.

Sensible Software was the Essex developer that school friends Jon Hare and Chris Yates set up in 1986. Their Commodore 64 games for Ocean, Parallax and Wizball, made their name, and MicroProse Soccer showed what they could do with football. On the Amiga they made Mega-lo-Mania, Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder, three of the best-reviewed games of the early 1990s. Codemasters bought the company in 1999.

Ken and Roberta Williams started On-Line Systems in 1980 to sell Mystery House, a murder-mystery adventure with pictures that Roberta designed and Ken programmed on their Apple II. As Sierra On-Line, based in the small towns of Coarsegold and Oakhurst near Yosemite, it built its own game languages, AGI and then SCI, and made King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight. CUC International bought it in 1996; its new owners closed the original studio in 1999 and Activision Blizzard shut the company in 2008, and Activision revived the name as a label in 2014.

Louis-Marie and André Rocques's studio at Lognes, east of Paris, was registered in October 1987. Its Ishar role-playing games let the party vote on who joined it, Transarctica sent an armoured train across a frozen Europe, and Robinson's Requiem made the player treat their own wounds, down to amputating a gangrenous leg. It moved to the PC in the later 1990s and closed in 2003.

Sinclair Research built the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, and cut the price of a home computer far enough to create the British bedroom-coder generation. It also shipped late, shipped faulty machines, and held £5 million in QL orders it could not fill. On 7 April 1986 Sir Clive Sinclair sold its computer business to Alan Sugar's Amstrad for £5 million.

One of the development companies Sega set up in 2000. Smilebit made the cel-shaded Jet Set Radio for the Dreamcast, then moved to Microsoft's Xbox for Jet Set Radio Future, GunValkyrie and Panzer Dragoon Orta, while also making Sega's football and baseball management games for Japan. Sega folded it back into the company in 2004.

Eikichi Kawasaki founded SNK (Shin Nihon Kikaku) in Osaka in July 1978. It made its name with arcade games such as Vanguard and Ikari Warriors, launched the Neo Geo in 1990 as one system for arcades and homes, and challenged Capcom with Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown and The King of Fighters. Sold to Aruze in 2000, it went bankrupt in 2001; Kawasaki's new company, Playmore, took over its games and became SNK Playmore, renamed SNK in 2016.

Softdisk of Shreveport, Louisiana, sold software by subscription as monthly disk magazines: Softdisk for the Apple II, Loadstar for the Commodore 64, Big Blue Disk for the IBM PC and Diskworld for the Macintosh. It dated itself to 1981 and claimed over 75,000 customers a month in 1989. Its PC games subscription, Gamer's Edge, employed John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall, who left in February 1991 to found id Software and kept supplying Softdisk with games for a year.

Software Creations brought arcade games to home computers before moving into NES and SNES development. Its work depended on programmers, artists and musicians finding different solutions for each machine. A 1992 interview with founders Richard Kay and Mike Webb records that transition, from Bubble Bobble to Solstice, Equinox and Plok.

Founded in Liverpool at the end of 1983 by Matthew Smith with Alan and Soo Maton, all three out of Bug-Byte, Software Projects took Manic Miner with it, published Jet Set Willy in spring 1984, and went on to licensed conversions such as Lode Runner and Dragon's Lair. It was still selling Manic Miner, on the Amiga, in 1990.

Sonic Team took its name from the credit on Sega's 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog. Led by Yuji Naka, it went on to make NiGHTS into Dreams, Sonic Adventure, ChuChu Rocket! and Phantasy Star Online, became a separate Sega company in 2000, absorbed United Game Artists in 2003 and returned to Sega in 2004. Naka left in 2006; under Takashi Iizuka the studio still makes the Sonic games.

The Japanese electronics company made MSX home computers under the HitBit name, designed the Super Famicom's sound chip, and lost a CD-ROM partnership with Nintendo in public at the 1991 Chicago CES. It set up Sony Computer Entertainment in 1993, bought Psygnosis the same year, launched the PlayStation in December 1994 and has made PlayStation consoles ever since.

Sports Interactive grew out of Championship Manager, a football management game that the brothers Paul and Oliver Collyer began as schoolboys and Domark published in 1992. The company itself was registered in 1994. It developed the series for Domark and then Eidos until 2003, when Eidos kept the name and the studio kept its game, which it has sold as Football Manager, published by Sega, since November 2004. Sega bought the studio in 2006.

Square became an independent company in Tokyo in 1986 and made its name the next year with Final Fantasy, a role-playing game its designer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, had approached as a last attempt at a hit. It built the series on Nintendo's consoles, moved it to Sony's PlayStation for the space a CD gave, and with Final Fantasy VII in 1997 took the Japanese role-playing game round the world. In 2001, as Square reported its first losses, its costly Hollywood film, The Spirits Within, failed at the box office. In 2003 Square merged with its old rival Enix to form Square Enix, which still makes Final Fantasy.

A Swedish developer founded in 1998 by Magnus Högdahl of the demo group Triton. After its first game was cancelled, it made its name with licensed first-person games, above all The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004). Its founder and six senior colleagues left in 2009; it then merged with Overkill, the makers of Payday, became a publisher, and went through court-supervised reconstruction in 2018–19.

Joel Billings founded Strategic Simulations in 1979. Beginning with John Lyon’s Computer Bismarck, SSI published wargames, sports simulations and fantasy role-playing games, including the Gold Box AD&D series. Its catalogue joined independent designers to a publisher that treated rules, maps and testing as part of the product.

Subor, in Chinese Xiaobawang (小霸王, 'Little Tyrant'), grew from a loss-making electronics factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong, that Duan Yongping took over in 1989. It copied Nintendo's Famicom, and from 1993 sold the copy with a keyboard as a 'learning machine' for typing, English and BASIC, advertised by Jackie Chan. Duan left in 1995 to found BBK. A return to games consoles with an AMD-based PC console ended in a bankruptcy application in 2020.

Sunsoft is the games label of Sun Electronics (Sun Corporation), an electronics company founded in Kōnan, Aichi, in 1971. It made arcade games from 1978, licensed Kangaroo to Atari, and from the mid-1980s became a Famicom and NES publisher known for Blaster Master, Batman and Journey to Silius. Its American arm retrenched in 1995; the brand returned with new games in 2024.

Amir Rao and Gavin Simon left EA in 2009 and made Bastion, an action role-playing game with a narrator who comments on everything the player does, in Rao's father's house. It sold over 1.7 million copies in two years. The self-funded San Francisco studio followed it with Transistor (2014), Pyre (2017), Hades (2020) and Hades II (2025), keeping the same core team and the music of Darren Korb.

Richard Hanson and John Dyson started Superior Software in Leeds in 1982 with £50 each. It grew from BBC Micro arcade copies into the leading publisher for the BBC Micro and Electron: Tim Tyler's Repton series, Peter Johnson's Deathstar, Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith's Exile, and from 1986 the Acornsoft catalogue, Elite included. As Superior Interactive it still sells new versions of its old games.

Mark Cale set up System 3 as a teenager. Its first hit, Death Star Interceptor, was a Star Wars game in all but name; International Karate, IK+, The Last Ninja and Myth made it one of the best-known names on the Commodore 64. It later made Constructor, licensed Epyx's games in 2006 and is still publishing, with Cale in charge.

Michael Kogan founded Taito in 1953 to import vending machines and jukeboxes. Its engineer Tomohiro Nishikado turned it to video games in the 1970s and made Space Invaders in 1978. After a lean spell in the early 1980s Taito's own designers produced Bubble Bobble, Arkanoid, Darius, Operation Wolf and Chase H.Q., which reached British home computers through Imagine, Firebird and Ocean. Square Enix bought the company in 2005; it still runs arcades and makes games.

A Fort Worth business that began in 1918 selling shoe leather, bought the Boston electronics chain Radio Shack in the early 1960s, and in 1977 used its thousands of shops to sell the fully assembled TRS-80. It followed with the Color Computer in 1980 and the PC-compatible Tandy 1000 in 1984, sold its computer factories to AST in 1993, and renamed itself RadioShack Corporation in 2000.

An in-house Sega team formed in 1994 to make Panzer Dragoon, a showpiece for the new Saturn. Over four years it made three games in one invented world: the rail shooter Panzer Dragoon (1995), its prequel Panzer Dragoon II Zwei (1996) and the four-disc role-playing game Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998). The team broke up after Saga, and its people went on to Smilebit, United Game Artists and elsewhere.

A small studio in Adelaide, South Australia, led by Ari Gibson and William Pellen. Their game-jam knight became Hollow Knight, funded on Kickstarter with A$57,138 in 2014, released in 2017 and expanded with four free content packs. Its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, grew out of a Kickstarter stretch goal and came out in September 2025.

Team Ninja began in the mid-1990s as a design group inside Tecmo, led by Tomonobu Itagaki and set the task of rivalling Virtua Fighter. Its Dead or Alive helped pull Tecmo back from financial trouble, and its 2004 Ninja Gaiden revived Ryu Hayabusa on the Xbox. After Itagaki left in 2008 the studio worked with Nintendo on Metroid: Other M, moved into Souls-like action with Nioh, and carried on inside Koei Tecmo.

Team17 was formed in December 1990 when Wakefield's 17-Bit Software, a public-domain disk library, joined up with Team 7, the programmers and artist behind the budget game Miami Chase. Its Amiga games, from Full Contact and Alien Breed to Superfrog, sold on their looks. Worms, signed in 1994 and sold across formats through a 1995 distribution deal with Ocean, carried the company into the 21st century. It floated in 2018, and its parent was renamed everplay group plc in 2025.

Technos Japan was founded in 1981 by Kunio Taki and Takashi Hanya, who had left Data East, with Takeo Hagiwara. Its 1986 arcade game Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun became Renegade in the West, and Yoshihisa Kishimoto's Double Dragon (1987) became, in Retro Gamer's words, the defining beat-'em-up of the Eighties. In Japan the Kunio-kun series grew into dozens of games, including River City Ransom. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and closed in 1997; its games passed to Million and, in 2015, to Arc System Works.

Technosoft, which spelled its name Tecno Soft for much of its life, worked from Sasebo in Nagasaki prefecture. It began the Thunder Force shooters on Japanese home computers in 1983, made three of them for the Mega Drive, and in Herzog Zwei (1989) built a console strategy game that Westwood's Dune II team named as an influence. It stopped making games at the end of the 1990s; Sega bought its rights in 2016.

The Tokyo company that traded as Tehkan made arcade games from 1981, among them Star Force, Bomb Jack and Tehkan World Cup, and renamed itself Tecmo in 1986. On the NES it made Ninja Gaiden and Tecmo Bowl; in the 1990s Tomonobu Itagaki's Team Ninja made Dead or Alive. After turning down a takeover bid from Square Enix in 2008, Tecmo joined Koei under a holding company in 2009 and merged into Koei Tecmo Games in 2010.

Tectoy, founded in São Paulo in September 1987, made and sold Sega's machines in Brazil from the Master System in 1989 onwards. It built them locally, translated and rebuilt Sega games around Brazilian characters such as Mônica, squeezed Street Fighter II onto the Master System in 1997, put the Mega Drive online with Mega Net, and was still making Master System consoles decades after Sega stopped. By 2016 it had sold more than 8 million of them in Brazil.

British Telecom went into games publishing in 1984 with Firebird. As Telecomsoft it grew into one of Britain's larger publishers, with Elite, The Sentinel, Starglider, The Pawn and Carrier Command, bought Beyond, and signed Graftgold away from Hewson, then went to court to publish its games. BT put it up for sale in 1989, and MicroProse bought it that spring.

Founded in 2004 by Dan Connors, Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander after LucasArts cancelled Sam & Max: Freelance Police, Telltale sold adventure games in monthly episodes over the internet. The Walking Dead (2012) made it famous, with more than 80 game of the year awards; rapid expansion followed, and in September 2018 it laid off almost all of its staff and was wound up. LCG Entertainment bought the name and some of its games in 2019, and the new Telltale has The Wolf Among Us 2 due in 2027.

Tengen was Atari Games’ home-game subsidiary from 1987 to 1994. It published arcade conversions for several consoles and challenged Nintendo’s control of NES cartridges. The 10NES copyright litigation and the separate Tetris rights dispute explain different parts of that history.

Newsfield set up Thalamus in 1986 to publish a Finnish teenager's shoot-'em-up, and it became the Commodore 64 label behind Sanxion, Delta, Quedex, Hunter's Moon, Hawkeye, Armalyte and Creatures. It outlived Newsfield's liquidation in 1991 and carried on as Thalamus Europe into 1993; the name returned in 2017 as Thalamus Digital.

A games developer and publisher in Gütersloh, Germany, founded in October 1988 by Holger Flottmann, Udo Fischer and Erik Simon, two of them members of the pioneering Atari ST demo group The Exceptions. Its ST and Amiga games included Dragonflight, Chambers of Shaolin, No Second Prize, Lionheart, Amberstar and Ambermoon. Most of its development team left for Blue Byte at the end of 1993, and by mid-1994 the company had gone bankrupt.

The Bitmap Brothers were Mike Montgomery, Steve Kelly and Eric Matthews, three unrelated programmers who formed a team in 1987 and put their own name at the front of their games. Xenon, Speedball, Xenon 2, Speedball 2, Gods, Magic Pockets and The Chaos Engine made them the best-known developers of the Amiga and Atari ST years, and in 1990 they started their own label, Renegade. They moved on to PC strategy with Z, and in 2019 Rebellion bought the brand and its games.

Ian Anderson's Sheffield graphic design studio, founded in 1986, made its name with record sleeves for Pop Will Eat Itself and Warp Records. From 1995 to 1999 it designed the logos, icons and packaging of Psygnosis's WipEout games, the most visible case of a games publisher hiring an outside design studio to give a game an identity. It went into voluntary liquidation in 2009, and Anderson bought back the name and carried on.

The games label of Tim Langdell's Softek, launched in London in 1984. It published Bo Jangeborg's Fairlight, which CRASH gave 95% in November 1985, and the Figgins brothers' Bobby Bearing, which took 94% the next August, then turned to licences such as Garfield and arcade conversions. By 1991 Langdell was running the business from California, where it became Edge Games.

Founded in California around 1980 by the educational psychologist Ann Piestrup to receive a federal research grant, with Teri Perl and the Atari programmer Warren Robinett, The Learning Company made Rocky's Boots, Gertrude's Puzzles and the Reader Rabbit series. SoftKey took it over in 1995 and adopted its name; Mattel bought the enlarged company for $3.5 billion in 1999 and gave it away the following year.

Tiertex was a Manchester development studio founded in 1987 by Donald Campbell and John Prince. It converted dozens of arcade games for U.S. Gold, which bought a stake in it, across up to eight formats at once. Its reviews ranged from a 91% CRASH Smash for Thunder Blade to 31% in Zzap!64 for Human Killing Machine. Later it wrote console and Game Boy games, and it stopped trading in about 2003.

An Illinois toy company founded by Randy Rissman and Roger Shiffman, which Hasbro dated to 1979. Tiger published Atari 2600 and TI-99/4A cartridges as Tigervision in the early 1980s, made cheap licensed LCD handhelds for years, and in 1997 launched the Game.com, a cartridge handheld with a touch screen and an internet cartridge. Hasbro bought Tiger in 1998 for about $335 million, months before Tiger's Furby became a Christmas craze.

A Japanese arcade developer that made shoot-'em-ups from 1984 until it went bankrupt in 1994: Tiger-Heli, Flying Shark, Twin Cobra, Truxton, Zero Wing and, last, Batsugun, which is often dated as the start of the 'bullet hell' style. Its staff went on to found Cave, Raizing and Gazelle, and its games came back in the 2020s under Tatsujin, a company set up by its founders.

Masato Maegawa and a group of Konami staff left in 1992 to make their own games, and set up Treasure in Tokyo. Its first release, Gunstar Heroes on the Mega Drive, was followed by Dynamite Headdy, Alien Soldier, Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Sin and Punishment and Ikaruga. Kept to about thirty developers, it worked for Sega, Nintendo, ESP and Konami, and its new games dried up after 2014.

Troika Games was founded in April 1998 by three of Fallout's makers, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, after they left Interplay. In seven years it made three role-playing games for three different publishers: Arcanum (Sierra, 2001), The Temple of Elemental Evil (Atari, 2003) and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Activision, 2004). Each found admirers among critics, and each was criticised for its bugs. Troika could not find a publisher for a fourth game and closed early in 2005; its founders went on to Blizzard, Obsidian and inXile.

Geoff and Anne Brown's U.S. Gold began in 1984 as a brand for American computer games, financed by their Midlands distributor CentreSoft. It went on to buy arcade licences such as Gauntlet, Out Run and Street Fighter, and its conversions drew some of the best and some of the worst reviews of the 8-bit years. It joined CentreSoft in CentreGold, floated in 1993 and was bought by Eidos in 1996.

Five Guillemot brothers from Brittany, already selling other publishers' software in France, set up Ubi Soft in 1986 to publish games of their own. It made its name with Rayman in 1995, floated on the Paris stock exchange in 1996, bought Red Storm, Blue Byte and The Learning Company's games business around 2000, and grew into one of the world's largest publishers with Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. It saw off takeover moves by Electronic Arts and Vivendi, and in 2025 moved its biggest series into a subsidiary part-owned by Tencent.

Tim and Chris Stamper's Ultimate Play the Game made Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire. Between 1983 and 1986 CRASH counted fourteen Spectrum hits in a row, averaging 93% in its reviews, while the company gave out almost no information about itself. By 1988 the Stampers had moved on to Rare and the Nintendo console.

United Game Artists (UGA) was the Sega studio led by Tetsuya Mizuguchi. It began as his AM Annex arcade team, became Software R&D No. 9 to make Space Channel 5 for the Dreamcast, and took the UGA name when Sega split its development into separate companies in 2000. It made Rez and Space Channel 5 Part 2, came third in Edge's Developer of the Year award for 2001, and was merged into Sonic Team in 2003, shortly before Mizuguchi left Sega.

Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington left Microsoft and founded Valve near Seattle in 1996. Its first game, Half-Life, published by Sierra in 1998 on a reworked Quake engine, won Game of the Year; Valve then hired the makers of Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and later Dota, built Steam to update and sell its games, won a legal fight with its publisher over distribution, and grew into the largest shop for PC games, while still making games and, later, its own hardware.

Nick Alexander started Virgin Games inside Richard Branson's Virgin Group in 1983. It sold Spectrum and Commodore games with pictures of their programmers on the inlays, bought Leisure Genius and then Mastertronic, and distributed Sega's consoles in Europe until Sega bought that business in 1991. Renamed Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993, it published Aladdin, The Lion King, Cannon Fodder and The 7th Guest, owned Westwood Studios from 1992 until Electronic Arts bought it in 1998, and after passing through Blockbuster, Viacom, Interplay and Titus became Avalon Interactive in 2003.

A small Manchester software house built around one programmer, Costa Panayi, and run by Luke Andrews. Its Spectrum games, from Android 2 and TLL to Highway Encounter and Revolution, drew solid-looking 3D worlds from high above, and by 1986 CRASH had never scored one of Panayi's games below 79%. From late 1986 its games were marketed by U.S. Gold and then published with Gremlin Graphics.

Two former film students, Paul Carrington and Lisa Tunnah, set up Vulcan Software in Portsmouth in 1994 to publish Valhalla, a talking adventure they wrote in AMOS. Reviews ranged from 19% to warm praise, but Vulcan kept releasing cheap mail-order Amiga games after Commodore's collapse, and by mid-1997 an American magazine called it the most prolific Amiga games publisher. It stopped developing its own Amiga games in 1998.

Brett Sperry and Louis Castle founded Westwood in Las Vegas in 1985. It began by converting other publishers' games, made Eye of the Beholder for SSI, and in Dune II (1992) set the harvest-build-fight pattern that real-time strategy followed. Virgin bought it in 1992; Command & Conquer (1995) sold well over a million copies; Electronic Arts paid $122.5 million for it in 1998 and closed it in 2003.

A Chicago pinball company founded by Harry Williams, the man credited with the tilt mechanism. After a brief try at video games in the Pong era it came back in 1980 with Eugene Jarvis's Defender, then Stargate, Robotron: 2084, Joust and Sinistar, all on its own 6809 hardware. In 1988 it bought Bally's Midway division, which made its later video games; it led pinball into the 1990s, left it in 1999 for slot machines, and was absorbed into Scientific Games in 2016.

Xenia Edizioni S.r.l. of Milan published the Italian editions of Zzap! and The Games Machine from September 1991, the month Newsfield went into liquidation. It kept the same staff, PO box, printer and distributor as Edizioni Hobby, and a former staff writer recalled the change as a new name for the same publisher. It dropped the Newsfield licence line in October 1991, closed Zzap! in December 1993, and published The Games Machine until it sold the title in 2005.

John Wilson's mail-order adventure label, named after his cat and run from his home in Rochdale. From 1987 it sold his own Quill adventures and then games by dozens of other amateur authors, mostly for the Spectrum at £1.99 to £2.49, and later for the Atari ST and, under emulation, the Amiga. It stopped releasing new games in 1997, and Wilson kept its catalogue available for emulators long afterwards.

A budget publisher set up in Newcastle in 1987 by Brian Jobling, the former CRASH adventure columnist Derek Brewster and Martin O'Donnell. It sold 8-bit games at £2.99, added 16-bit and full-price labels, and by 1992 was releasing more than six titles a month. The same company was renamed Merit Studios (Europe) in 1994 and Eutechnyx in 1997, and made racing games until it was dissolved in 2025.

Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann left Intel in 1974 to start Zilog, and Exxon's venture arm paid for its first chip, the Z80. The Z80 went into the TRS-80, Sinclair's computers, the Amstrad CPC, MSX and arcade boards such as Pac-Man and Galaga. Zilog never matched Intel; it passed through Exxon, its own managers, IXYS and Littelfuse, which ended standalone Z80 production in 2024.