There was a stretch, roughly from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, when a handful of studios invented almost everything we now take for granted about video games. They gave us the adventure and the role-playing game, real-time strategy and the immersive sim, survival horror and the cinematic blockbuster. Many of them are gone now, folded into bigger companies or closed outright, but the genres they created define the medium to this day.
This is a guide to those studios, one page at a time. Each links to a full cross-media tour of its games, its people and the worlds it built. Start anywhere.
The adventure houses
The masters of the point-and-click and the graphic adventure.
The genres they invented
The adventure houses taught games to tell stories. But at the same time, in other rooms in other countries, other studios were building the systems that would define the medium's other half: the tech trees and armies of real-time strategy, the deep, branching worlds of the role-playing game, the tense, authored dread of horror.
Real-time strategy, simulation and god games
The studios that let you command armies, run empires and play god.
The role-playing masters
The homes of the great RPG, from Baldur's Gate to Final Fantasy to Wizardry.
Shooters and the first-person frontier
The studios that built and reinvented the shooter.
Horror, cinema and the French scene
Survival horror, the cinematic game and Europe's most distinctive studios.
The console and arcade giants
The powerhouses of the coin-op, the console and the modern era.
Listen: the history of games on Podfriend
Deep-dive podcasts and collections on the people and studios that built the medium.
For twenty-odd years, a handful of studios invented almost everything we take for granted about video games. This is a guide to them.
Frequently asked
What counts as the golden age of game studios?
Roughly the period from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, when studios like Sierra, LucasArts, Westwood, Interplay, Origin, Konami and others invented and perfected most of the genres that define games today, from the adventure and the RPG to real-time strategy, survival horror and the cinematic blockbuster.
Which studios are covered?
This hub links to full guides on Sierra On-Line, LucasArts, Westwood Studios, MicroProse, Interplay, Origin Systems, Bullfrog, Revolution Software, Delphine Software, Wadjet Eye, Eidos, Infogrames, Broderbund, Psygnosis and Konami, with more added over time.
What happened to these studios?
Their fates vary. Some, like Revolution and Wadjet Eye, are still independent and active. Many others were acquired and eventually closed, including Sierra, LucasArts, Westwood, Origin, Bullfrog and Psygnosis. Their franchises and genres, however, live on across the whole industry.