I know it is, but it’s a stretch selling those games as a way to achieve it. The fact that it was central in their marketing campaign was what tickled me!
Going way off the reservation for S because it’s the easiest to find game studios for and that means we should plumb the depths of gaming’s past for something awesome and truly unique…
SWINGIN’ APE STUDIOS!
They made one of the best games of the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era and it totally holds up today IMO.
They are also well known for being the developer of the cancelled StarCraft: Ghost.
I bought Metal Arms way back for the GC but for some reason I never got round to spending any real time with it. I just checked my collection list and it’s not on there, so I either missed it or sold it on. Will have to look into that!
It’s got so many memorable things in it. Those guys deserved better than how things went with Blizzard. Fortunately some of them landed on their feet making arcade games again. H2Overdrive… Batman… that’s them.
Specular Interactive…
One of the best things…
If you don’t buy anything from the shop, there is a 10% chance of Mr. Pockets flipping you off.
Following @DaveLong 's lead I came across Ultimate Play the Game
Active from 1982 to 1987, they are known for games such as Jetpac, Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore, and eventually evolved into a little studio known as Rare.
I had never heard of them before so this was a neat read.
Not completely clear on their developmental history but they’ve published a number of niche titles during the 5th generation. Their logo graced the Japanese-only releases of Umihara Kawase: Shun, Wolf Fang Kuuga 2001, the K1: Fighting Illusion series, and the Arcade Gears series of ports to the Playstation and Sega Saturn, among others.
Most recently they’ve focused on karaoke games for the Wii and Switch.
Now that we’ve done one full alphabet cycle, I think freeform cool logos is OK?
Here’s an old one I spotted and redrew.
This is the logo of パール (Pearl), sometimes listed as パールソフト (Pearl Soft), a defunct Japanese video game developer from around 1983. I spotted it on some old software and redrew it.
The short lived Atari Interactive logo. The last logo used by the real Atari. It was when Atari was going to go 3rd party multi-platform, after the failure of the Jaguar. They only released one game, Tempest 2000 on the PC, before shutting down operations.
Whilst reminiscent of the LG logo (1995–) this is from around 1986–1992 and was more likely to have been inspired by the Macintosh. Hulinks were a developer/publisher/distrubutor of games/apps/hardware on the Japanese Macintosh scene.