Introduction
There are game studios we thought would never go away no matter what the circumstances are. And with some of them, we were wrong. - You lose. Good day, sir. - Some truly historically incredible studios are just dead. And I think we should pour one out for some of them right now. Hi folks, it's Zaid Ikram. And today on Gamix, 10 legendary game studios that have vanished.
Monolith Productions
Starting off with number 10, it's Monolith Productions. These were the guys that you'd think would have been around forever. All the guys making groundbreaking FPS games back in the '90s, mostly still alive. id Software, still making DOOM games.
Raven is doing good work, putting their stamp on the Call of Duty franchise. Even 3D Realms, the guys behind Duke Nukem 3D and, I mean, ultimately the causes of Duke Nukem Forever, if not directly behind it. They're still around in at least some form. I guess the guys who made Duke 3D are gone, but the name's still there.
Monolith is one of those studios. They made Blood, a truly classic among shooters. What was so impressive about Monolith is just how versatile they could be. They never settled for just one franchise or just one type of game. They were always experimenting, making unique and interesting stuff. Their catalog of games honestly hit after hit.
Blood in '97, Shogo in '98, Blood II in '98. That one sucked, but it wasn't Monolith's fault. It's a whole thing. 2000 had No One Lives Forever, which is an awesome spy-themed FPS that was just way ahead of its time. And in 2005, there was of course F.E.A.R., one of the all-time great shooters. The slowdown time, the destruction, the fantastic AI, the creepy atmosphere.
This one, it had all of it. In the same year, they also put out Condemned: Criminal Origins, which was also a really good first-person horror game. More of a focus on melee combat and exploration. But not a lot of devs put out two very good games in one year, especially devs of this size. And then in 2014, we got the first Middle Earth game, Shadow of Mordor.
In a lot of ways, it's kind of an Arkham City copycat, but the whole nemesis system stuff was really groundbreaking, at least in concept. And it was pretty damn fun. They had a sequel which expanded on it. It was also damn fun. I love the nemesis system actually. After that though, they went to work on their next game, and it never came together.
I don't know what's going on behind the scenes at Monolith or Warner Brothers, but something went seriously wrong. Up until 2014, the longest gap between game releases from this studio was just three years. After Shadow of Mordor, we got nothing for eight years. And then Warner shuttered the studio entirely.
Prior to the shutdown, reports were circulating that their next game would've been based on Wonder Woman. It already had $100 million dumped into it. And even at the start of 2025, the game was not in a releasable state. Going by that, not hard to understand why Warner closed the studio, but I've gotta imagine the blame flows both ways here.
Maybe Monolith just didn't have it anymore. Or maybe Warner kept spinning them in circles, trying to squeeze the live service game out of them. Lord knows that's happened. Everything I ever hear about them, it makes them sound clueless. But the common narrative that all game studios are closed because of greedy publishers, like that's not always true.
Maybe all the talent left, there's no enthusiasm for whatever the next project was, whether it was Wonder Woman or something else. Who really knows. But it does suck to see them go. Studios as long-running and legendary as this deserve to live on in some form, even if their best years are behind them.
Arkane Austin
At number nine is Arcane Austin. And it's a complicated one 'cause Arkane as a studio is still around. Their main studio in Lyon, France, it's still there. But the Austin studio is no more. It was closed down by Microsoft in 2024, along with several other Bethesda studios. So while Arkane as an entity still exists and is apparently working on a game based on the Marvel character Blade, one of their key studios is no more.
Founded in 2006, the Austin studio's actual contributions are a little nebulous for a lot of their games 'cause at first, both the Lyon studio and the Austin studio worked together on projects. We know they're at least partially responsible for the first Dishonored, but their one true legendary accomplishment on their own was 2017's Prey, a game they worked on exclusively while the main office made Dishonored 2.
And while that sequel is fantastic, Prey is probably Arkane's best game. It's the ultimate immersive sim. It's a highly systematic game with a huge interconnected space station and all these interlocking systems. It makes my head spin. And like most of Arkane's output, Prey wasn't a massive success, but it earned the studio a lot of respect and admiration.
Like it was a true expression of what people expected from an Arkane game, first-person, lots of player freedom, intricate level design, physics, interaction, lots of stuff. It's unfortunate the real history of Arkane is one of constantly scrapping to get by, working as a support studio on other games, making many failed prototypes, including at least one Half-Life 2 expansion pack, and one game produced by Steven Spielberg, of all people, because at least for a little while, when they did get the chance, they made something magical.
And then there's Redfall. The studio's follow-up to Prey, which was live service, always online. And nothing like what the studio was known for. Why even bother? From what I read, it sounds like Bethesda was looking to sell. So they decided to inflate their value by starting up development on a bunch of live service projects.
Keep in mind, this was the late 2010s and it seemed like live service equaled infinite money. The problem was that nobody in Arkane actually wanted to make Redfall. It was not the kind of game people who joined Arkane wanted to make. So apparently, and this is a crazy number, 70% of the studio who actually worked on Prey had left by the time Redfall actually came out.
Also it failed. It was, I mean, for all intents and purposes not a good game. So Microsoft shut down the studio. Their actual output wasn't always consistent, but sometimes all it takes is one or two truly great games to make a studio legendary. And their work on the Dishonored games and Prey in particular was next level.
Ready at Dawn
At number eight is Ready at Dawn, oof. Formed in 2003, this studio was mostly known for their surprisingly high quality adaptions of PlayStation properties to handhelds. Their first game, Daxter, which is based on Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter games, it was surprisingly good for a game not made by the main studio, as were their God of War games for the PSP, which are practically as good as the mainline games.
The kind of graphics they were able to push on the PSP was also remarkable. Especially when it goes to Sparta, which might be their best game overall. It's not just good for a handheld God of War game, it's legitimately one of the best games in the franchise. After proving themselves on the PlayStation Portable, they took their technical expertise and made what is still one of the most graphically impressive games of all time with The Order: 1886.
More of a tech demo than a real game, really cool concept, deserved to be fleshed out, given the time it needed. But in terms of visual fidelity, you can't deny how good this game looks for a PS4 game in 2015. It's one of those games that needs a sequel to expand and improve on the ideas of the first, but it unfortunately never happened.
After the failure of The Order: 1886, Ready at Dawn moved on from their collaborations with Sony and took their technical know-how to the world of VR. They made an excellent game called Lone Echo. It was published by Oculus Studios and sadly Meta, also known as Facebook, bought them in 2020 and then closed them four years later.
The recent history of Facebook, Meta, whatever, is just one boneheaded decision after another. So it wasn't really a surprise they'd do absolutely nothing with a talented developer like Ready at Dawn after acquiring them. But it sucks a lot. I wish something would happen like with the Savage Planet people where they formed another company and kept making games.That'd be nice, but also it's not Ready at Dawn.
Volition
At number seven is Volition. Oof, God, this list just stings as we move along. You probably know these guys for their Saints Row games, but they actually got their start a lot earlier, way back in 1993. And it actually put them up there with gaming titans like id Software and fellow casualty Monolith.
It's another studio with a hell of an eclectic catalog. They were guys who were always trying out new things. And to their credit, it mostly worked. If you wanna be clear, Descent was a technical marvel at its time. And also something I wasted more time than you could possibly imagine playing. They wanted to do Descent II and FreeSpace, huge games in their own right.
But one of the more overlooked titles were the Summoner games. They're fantasy RPGs for PS2. They're pretty underrated and they're both completely different from one another while still having that particular Volition quirkiness and humor. Their work on the Red Faction games is more well-known. The first is noteworthy just for its destruction technology.
But the best game in the series didn't come out until the Xbox 360 with Red Faction: Guerrilla, which, by the way, even though it's a huge pain in the neck to get into the game using the Steam Deck, I grin and bear it. I play that game to this day. That's not just the best Red Faction game, it's probably the best modern Volition game period.
Core Design
They may have hit it big in 1996, but they were founded back in 1988. They were making games for the Amiga and Atari ST and ZX Spectrum. They made a wide variety of games in a lot of genres. But, I mean, Tomb Raider's their big one. Even when it was successful, they were making games in other genres on top of their yearly Tomb Raider releases.
It's pretty obvious that the team was not prepared for the yearly release schedule though. The review score kept getting worse and worse. The series really failed to innovate or expand on the formula. The games mostly just got more frustrating. And by the time *Tomb Raider: Chronicles* came out, players were pretty sick of the same old thing with, you know, a slightly new coat of paint.
*Angel of Darkness* was gonna be the game that brought Tomb Raider into the next generation. But poor planning and management led to the game being in shambles and then finally dropped in 2003. Reviews, they were bad, sales weren't great, so Eidos took Tomb Raider from Core and put it in Crystal Dynamics. And they've been in charge of the franchise ever since—I'd say honestly for the better.
Without Tomb Raider, the studio, it didn't last long. Most of the Core staff walked, no pun intended. And while the studio shambled along for a while, leaderless and directionless for a few years, it was eventually closed in 2010 after becoming a support studio for Rebellion, which is actually a lot longer than I thought.
But they weren't really making any real games at that point. The last two games were completely anonymous PlayStation portable games, like literally might as well not have made games. It's crazy to imagine a studio handling their own IP so poorly. It was literally just taken away from them. Like imagine if Bungie got *Halo* taken away from them rather than they decided to leave Microsoft.
It's crazy, but that's exactly what happened here.
Japan Studio
At number two is SIE, Japan Studio. It may be hard to go back to the many PlayStation 1 games 'cause of how archaic most of them are from both a visual and game design perspective. But if you're looking at the history of video games, it was one of the most creative and ambitious times in game development.
Sony was throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. And it made for a hugely varied and deep catalog of games. A lot of the best projects came out in this era from Sony's internal Japanese Studio, which was really more of a publishing arm than a dedicated studio on its own. Knowing who worked on what can be difficult to pin down.
But we do know all the games published by Japan Studio, and it's a lot. There's the Ape Escape games, *Legend of Dragoon*, all the Team ICO games, including *ICO*, *Shadow of the Colossus* and *The Last Guardian.* They made the *Siren* games, some of the best survival horror games of all time. They partnered with FromSoftware to make the first *Demon's Souls*.
And while Sony thought that game was crap, it ended up being one of the most influential games of all time. It's just one great game after another. They did the *Puppeteer* and the *Gravity Rush* games. A lot of the Japan Studio games didn't sell all that well, but they were all highly rated. Well, they weren't all highly rated.
The ones that were notable were highly rated and respected. And their connection to Sony's consoles gave the brand prestige. The dedication to their Japanese Studios gave Sony cred with core gamers. Unfortunately, Sony did not respect what they had. Sure, Sony's Western developed games were well-received and sold well.
But Japan Studio provided variety. They offered an alternative to big-budget AAA titles. So when Sony restructured in 2021, they effectively eliminated the Japanese game development teams. The old-school Sony fans were understandably upset. The only remnant of Japan Studios still standing is Team ASOBI—the guys responsible for one of the few bright spots in what was otherwise a pretty dismal 2024 for Sony Entertainment with Astro Bot. Maybe dumping all their tried and tested Japanese game developers to throw away hundreds of millions on multiple live service game debacles wasn't the brightest idea.
Silicon Knights
And finally, at number one, Silicon Knights. This one's maybe number one for being interesting. They're legendary, maybe not for the right reasons though. To their credit, I mean, they did manage to make some good games. The original *Blood Omen* is a top-down action RPG Classic. *Eternal Darkness* is horror game royalty. And one of their best games on the GameCube was their remake of *Metal Gear Solid*, which is praised by many as being superior to the original version.
They made some truly great games and they made some bad ones, like *X-Men: Destiny*. But what makes Silicon Knights truly legendary was their seemingly endless feud with the rest of the game industry. These guys just could not help but burn every bridge possible, every bridge available while shooting themselves in the foot. Reading their history, it's a comedy of errors. They could not stop self-sabotaging. Was like it was a pastime for them.
Even as far back as *Blood Omen*, they got in a legal feud with Crystal Dynamics over the game's sequel. They cut ties with Nintendo after being unimpressed with the technical specs of the Wii. So they stepped away from Nintendo before the release of their most popular system to date up to that point. Also, they could make like a forgettable game on the Xbox 360 called *Too Human*. Some other games too that I literally just don't remember them.
It all came crashing down in 2014 as the years of legal battles finally took their toll. For some completely unfathomable reason, they decided, "Let's sue Epic Games" in 2007, claiming their version of the Unreal Engine, the one that Epic gave them, was somehow worse than the one Epic was using for its own games. Epic decided to counter-sue because they said that Silicon Knights stole Unreal Engine 3 code to make their own proprietary engine, which they provably did.
The legal beatdown was so bad, Silicon Knights was ordered to recall and destroy unsold copies of *Too Human* and *X-Men: Destiny*. I mean, to be fair, not the biggest loss of all time, but (laughs). I mean, it was far from the only blunder made by this company, but it was easily the biggest. And it would eventually lead them to closing their doors permanently in 2014, but only after years of promising an *Eternal Darkness* revival that got harder and harder to believe, especially after the frankly embarrassing Kickstarter campaign for *Shadow of the Eternals.*
I don't even need to—I don't wanna talk about what got that Kickstarter pulled. But rest assured, not good. Look it up if you're truly curious. It's a miracle that anything good came from the studio. But even so, you have to give them credit 'cause they did make some really incredible stuff when they put their back into it.
Conclusion
And that's all for today. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I'm Zaid Ikram. We'll see you next time right here on Gamix.
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