On the console side:
Nintendo for SMB, Zelda, Metroid
Konami for Castlevania, Contra, Gradius
Square for Chrono Trigger and FF1 (the only one I’ve played - I’m sure the rest are excellent)
Capcom for SF and Megaman
PC side:
Looking Glass for Thief
Eidos for Deus Ex
Maxis for SimCity (never played the Sims, but that is regarded highly too)
Weswood Studios for Dune 2, C & C, and the Kyrandia trilogy
Blizzard for WC, SC, Diablo
iD for Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake
Lucasarts for Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, DOTT, Dark Forces/Jedi Knight, Sam & Max, X-wing, TIE Fighter
and lastly Sierra for King’s Quest, Hero’s Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, Conquest of Camelot/Longbow, Betrayal at Krondor (I know it was actually Dynamix)
I know I’m neglecting a lot of good games and developers, but choosing from this list of my favorites, I’d have to say that Sierra is my top choice, followed by Lucasarts and then Nintendo.
I worked for Dynamix in 1992. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, both for Dynamix itself and for Dynamix’s parent company, Sierra.
Their software development “tools” were crafted by a small, cliqueish group of out-of-touch hackers. And when I say out-of-touch, I mean these guys didn’t have the slightest grasp of the principles of good large-scale software engineering. One of them not only refused to put comments in his code, he took other people’s comments out because he said it made it easier for him (and him alone) to read the code. The rest of them weren’t much better. They actually seemed to feel threatened by software frameworks build (and acutally used) by anyone other than themselves, even when these frameworks consistently cut development time in half for the artists and designers.
It finally caught up with them when they released Aces Over Europe, which ran in MS-DOS and required you to have at least 600K of free Real-Mode memory free – a feat only possible if you took out every single driver from your config.sys file and ran with a version of MS-DOS prior to version 6.0. You pretty much had to make a “special boot” disk (or partition) just to have enough free lower-memory RAM to play their game.
As a game player, well, thank goodness for Id Software! I can’t count how many hours, days, months of my life have been absorbed by Doom II.
The best game developer for the PC, by a wide margin, was Microprose. I am flabbergasted they’ve only been mentioned once so far. Holy moly. We’re talking about the company that not only made the best and most influential PC game ever, but had DOZENS of other great titles.
Just SOME of the games they made include:
Civilization (and Civ II.) Merely the best video game ever made.
Railroad Tycoon, a classic economic game
X-Com, one of the tensest squad combat games ever
Silent Service and S.S. 2, magnificent sub games
Colonization
Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!
Pirates!
Sword of the Samurai
Master of Orion (Simtex does get some credit for this)
Grand Prix/World Circuit
GunShip and GunShip 2000
F-19 Stealth Fighter
M1 Tank Platoon (way, way ahead of its time)
Rollercoaster Tycoon
1942: The Pacific Air War
B-17 Flying Fortress
Falcon 4.0
Hyperspeed
Transport Tycoon
And dozens of others. I’ll take Microsoft’s stuff over anyone’s, any day of the week.
I’d put Red Storm in as second, except they’ve consistently slid downhill ever since Urban Ops, and the Rainbow 6 line was the only thing they ever had going for them (After seeing how poorly SoaF turned out, I lost pretty much any shred of hope for the company).
Though I’d also like to vote for eSim Games, makers of Steel Beasts (And currently working on the sequel; Wheee ). I wish more game developers had the same level of attention to detail.
What’s the role of Strategy First- are they publishers or developers? Either way, they’ve put out some good historical stuff, like the Europa Universalis series and the Sudden Strike series.
Used to be LucasArts, but they managed to completely kill any integrity they used to have. (Although I know I’m going to chomp on Star Wars Galaxies like a bass, only to be disappointed…)
Maxis is best at milking a successful license without just putting out crap for the sake of putting out crap. (e.g., The Sims has a gajillion expansion packs, but they all feel like true expansions instead of just shovelware).
Square makes the Final Fantasy series, including the hands-down best videogame of all time, Final Fantasy Tactics. They also really creeped me out when they announced Kingdom Hearts – it was as if they had produced a game directed solely at me. (Are there really that many people who are fans of Final Fantasy and Disney?)
And I do buy every game that Blizzard puts out, the day it comes out. But that’s not saying that much, since they have two franchises and the games only come out once every three years or so.
Much as I love Final Fantasy Tactics and Front Mission 3, it’s not Square, no matter how much I like Civ it isn’t Firaxis. My all time favorite game developer is SSI, the makers of the infamous “gold box” AD&D games as well as the Buck Rogers RPGs that were just too damn cool for words.
Opened this thread with Looking Glass Studios on my head, but it looks like a few people already beat me to it.
Sierra used to be cool, and then around the same time CD-Roms got popular–they sold out to Cendant, then got bought out by Havas–and in the interim, they just really started blowing.
Konami is a big favorite of mine–for Castlevania, primarily. But also for the Silent Hill, Contra, and Metal Gear games.
Let us not forget the recently deceased Sir-Tech, creator of the Wizardry series. Also the one-hit wonder of Cavedog, maker of Total Annihilation, possibly the game I have played the most hours. Incidentally, Chris Taylor of Cavedog went on to make Dungeon Siege.
). I wish more game developers had the same level of attention to detail.