Game Studios That Should Be Resurrected

If you’ve been playing video games since long enough, chances are you’ve come across at least one epic game development studio that broke your heart by shutting down. Since we’ve been around the industry a while now, we’ve had our hearts broken multiple times and know that there’s no getting used to it. Whether a studio gets bought over, shut down or “merged” with another, the result’s usually that it loses its identity, and the well-oiled machine ends up with multiple faulty cogs that completely changes the way they make games. With that in mind, here are a few studios that went under, and we want resurrected so that they can continue making the awesome games they once made.

Looking Glass Studios

In a time when shooters were all about massive guns and blowing up everything that comes your way, Looking Glass studios showed the world that shooters could be more than just brainless fragfests. The studio was renowned for the way they’d reinvent the first-person shooter genre, thanks to titles like System Shock, and later on, the Thief series. They took a different approach from the rest of the industry and focused heavily on stealth gameplay in their Thief franchise, introducing us to the art of sneaking through shadows and tip-toeing around vigilant (and sometimes lazy) guards in dimly lit mansions, ancient cathedrals and gloomy, winding streets.

Looking Glass were masters of conjuring the best possible atmosphere, pushing their games deep into the realm of the immersive gameplay. After the reins of the Thief franchise was passed over to Ion Storm, the resulting game (Thief: Deadly Shadows) was good but it paled in comparison to the first two. When the studio shut down, its employees were lured by some of the biggest studios out there, and they worked on games such as Deus Ex, BioShock, Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Thief 4 was announced recently, and the project is being handled by Eidos. I doubt it will be nearly as good as the first two Thief games, but it’ll certainly be nostalgic for all of us Looking Glass fans.
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Ion Storm

With some of the best talent in the gaming industry, all eyes were on Ion Storm when it was formed in 1996 since it showed incredible potential. When the studio didn’t manage to make a single commercially successful title for ages, people got skeptical and lost interest. Then came along Deux Ex - the zenith of first-person shooter/ role-playing game hybrids, that took the industry by storm. The sheer number of ways to do even the simplest thing in the game gave the first-person shooter the depth it much needed. The game’s bleak world plagued by political turmoil laid the ground-work for what could be the greatest franchise in the history of gaming.

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Then they developed the console trash called Deus Ex: Invisible War (which a lot of you probably liked) that was a simplified shooter with extremely vague similarities with the original, and was designed for retards (since it lacked any semblance of depth the original had so masterfully injected).

The studio made another awesome RPG called Anachronox, that didn’t do too well commercially. After taking so many commercial flops, the studio finally curled up and died when their Austin Office was shutdown by Eidos in 2005.

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Westwood Studios

Ever noticed how ‘real-time strategy’ rhymes with ‘Westwood’? Ok, maybe it doesn’t, but there was a time when Westwood was a synonym for ‘awesome RTS games’. What started off as a company to port 8-bit games to 16-bit systems, quickly let its passion for development take over, turning it into a full-time game development studio. While its first few projects didn’t do too well, they struck gold with Dune II (1992), bringing them on the radar of all RTS fans out there. Then in 1995, they reinvented the genre furthermore with the birth of the most popular RTS franchise ever - Command & Conquer.

With a gripping and insane storyline and gameplay that surpassed even its own Dune II, the C&C franchise grew to epic proportions, spawning multiple off-shoot series and a new iteration almost every year.

When the studio started losing money, it was bought over by EA. Then the studio made a horrendous mistake