What are your favorite game studio's/or publishers of all time?

snowdog

snowdog

snowdog

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Thought it's a fun idea for a topic.
What game studio or publisher has contributed mosty to your game addiction, upbringing and the most fun?

For me my addition started with Microprose which for me is the GOAT still: the best games and game series imho have come from Microprose originally:

Sid Meier's Civilization series: Doesn't need explanation imho.
Transport Tycoon (Deluxe) ( I still consider games like Factorio would never be as good without Transport Tycoon to give an example. For me the first game I ever bought on pc-cdrom. I used to get up at 6am before school and before my parents were awake to play this in secret. Thousands and thousands of hours wasted, and later with OpenTTD.
Rollercoaster Tycoon series.
Railroad Tycoon series.
Masters of Orion / Star Trek Birth of the Federation.
Colonization.
Worms...
Xcom.

Microprose single-handedly cost me years of my life, but in a good and very educational way and helped with my upbringing, sparking interest and teaching knowlege. I think very fondly of them and their games.

Honorable mentions:

Ensemble Studio's (Aoe1, 2 and AOM): A very strong runner up, I cannot explain how much I loved AOE and later AOE2. I was 11 years old and in a clan playing AOE2 on the MSN gaming zone, good times... Because of this game I learned HTML (at 11-12 years old, as I wanted to update our clan website) and later programming.


Maxxis ( Sim city and Sims series)
Rockstar games ( or specific, R* North, needs no explanation)
Impressions Games/Sierra (Pharaoh, Caesar 3), I learned so much from these games...
Westwood Studios (command and conquer, RA, Generals, and later on the same engine LOTR:BFME for example). Just ******* awesome, Frank Klepacki through the speakers, Tanya, Kirov reporting, etc....
Blue Byte (Settlers series)
ID Games/softwake (Commander Keen series, and everything off their Q3 engine, I loved Mohaa, CoD)
Valve (for resparking PC gaming when Source came out and Steam being the first digital tv store success)
EA Digital Illusions CE and later Dice (NFS series, Mohaa, Battlefield 1942, Desert Combat for BF1942, BF2)
Game Freak (I'm not a huge Ninendo fan, but Pokemon for gameboy color was awesome)

Lesser known european publishers but still awesome :
Joymania (Knights and Merchants)
CSC Game world ( Cossacks series)

As you can see mostly older game studio's, as they contributed highly to more modern games.

Of the modern companies I guess I like CD Project Red, for their DRM-less and continued support of superb games. And GOG store of course...



Most modern game studio's are trash compared to the good old days imho...
 
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Rare


Unfortunately the majority of these companies got snapped up by larger corporation's and then sadly most have gone to the wall after being screwed up.

Rare is still going, but barely,
 
Nice to have worked at two of the studios mentioned already :)

For me back in the day, I would have to say Maxis, I sank so much time into Sim games, Sim Earth was a favourite, along with Sim City ofc.

A big fan of Jeff Minter and loved Llamatron.

It's hard to look past Id - Commander Keen games initially which were awesome (and nails at times), then, Wolf, Doom, Quake obviously, as most influential.
 
mrbios said:
I miss Westwood.

Might go back and play some old school command and conquer games come to think of it, feeling nostalgic for it.
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I'm doing so now - they were all on sale on Steam last week. Considering how old the games are the graphics look incredibly good today still - particularly tiberium wars. Even Generals doesn't look too bad for a 21 year old game
 
rumple9 said:
I'm doing so now - they were all on sale on Steam last week. Considering how old the games are the graphics look incredibly good today still - particularly tiberium wars. Even Generals doesn't look too bad for a 21 year old game
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Think I'm going to start with Tiberum sun and firestorm, that was always my favourite :D
 
Historically.

Sensible Software (i still have my wizball mug, tho i cant think of a bad title they made back in the day)
Bitmap brothers (speedball 2 / xenon 2 but so many more)
Microprose (Stunt car racer, F1GP and so many cool flight sims)
psygnosis
ultimate play the game / Rare


More recently, Naughty Dog springs to mind and despite my issues with some of their games, Codemasters.

individual titles (or 1 hit wonders) would be David Braben/ Ian Bells / Frontier Developments Elite Series and Dino Dinis Kick off 2.

in truth there are so many however........

oh god i forgot Team 17, westwood, bizarre creations, maxis, bullfrog, R* So many.

of course most of them were all bought out...... i guess it wont be long before its just EA, ubisoft and maybe epic!
 
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Rainbird from the ST/Amiga days. Classic blue box games such as Starglider, Magnetic Scrolls adventures etc.
InfoCom for their adventures in the same era.
 
Bubo said:
Rainbird from the ST/Amiga days. Classic blue box games such as Starglider, Magnetic Scrolls adventures etc.
InfoCom for their adventures in the same era.
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Stat glider 1 and 2 were both fantastic games.

David lowe (uncle art) did the music for starglider 2 which came on the tape with the game. I still have that on one of my playlists now.
 
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I've only known Capcom since later since I was never into consoles or arcade. I've been a PC exclusive gamer always, beside the old PS2 I bought later on cheaply (and barely used, it's hard going to SD gfx when you have been used to 1080p for ages, even at the ps2 time I was used to 1600x1200) and a Gamboy Color time.
While I think their games run great and are decent (I know Devil may Cry), I feel they are a ****** company now as they add DRM (which I consider malware) in (forced) updates to their old single player games and have a very negative stance to the modding community.

This actually made me pledge to not spend a single penny on them and always pirate or ignore their games in the future.
 
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snowdog said:
I've only known Capcom since later since I was never into consoles or arcade. I've been a PC exclusive gamer always, beside the old PS2 I bought later on cheaply (and barely used, it's hard going to SD gfx when you have been used to 1080p for ages, even at the ps2 time I was used to 1600x1200) and a Gamboy Color time.
While I think their games run great and are decent (I know Devil may Cry), I feel they are a ****** company now as they add DRM (which I consider malware) in (forced) updates to their old single player games and have a very negative stance to the modding community.

This actually made me pledge to not spend a single penny on them and always pirate or ignore their games in the future.
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its funny how things change. I am showing my age now but i remember back in the day thinking pc games were rubbish with their CGA and even EGA graphics, as well as the PC "squeeker" for sound.

then how the worm turned :D

(that said i was never a console gamer either, spectrum and Amiga all the way, until i eventually went over to the dark side and got a PC.
 
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