Rocksteady did nothing of note until Arkham Asylum.

My first and only example is From Software in the west . They were quite a niche deal prior to the whole Soulsborne thing, but the latter games gave them a larger following pretty much everywhere, and influenced many other developers.

edit: shikamaru, WHY

Nah Frame Gride is awesome so is Otogi series and Kings Field. They made plenty of good stuff. In fact I prefer their older output.

Rockstar North went from a bunch of average Amiga and Commodore 64 games to being a Lemmings factory... All the way to the heights of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead.

DOn't care about Meta. Also Armored Core series was great.

You're missing the point: AC was great to you (and to me), but you not caring about "Meta", which is aptly named, shows that you are missing the point.

No,not really. They made plenty of great games. They never needed redeeming. They just found something more mainstream. That's not redeeming.

A company that needed redeeming was Double Helix. After Killer Instinct and Strider they did. They made just garbage before that.

Yeah but Captain Skyhawk was awesome. More people should play that game.Also a technical marvel on NES. So many 3D like effects. Tho yeah wasn't til DKC they broke out of their shell.

There was a company called Eidetic, founded in 1993. Their first game was an early 3D platformer by the name of Bubsy 3D. We all know how that went.

After that fiasco, Sony still trusted them enough to ask them to rip off Goldeneye. They were basically told to make something that was full of stealth and espionage and whatnot. After two or so years, they finally released Syphon Filter, a third person shooter with stealth elements. It got a 90 on Metacritic and two sequels in rapid succession, released in 2000 and 2001.

So around this time, they were properly bought by Sony, and were renamed SCE Bend. After the less acclaimed Syphon Filter: Omega Strain on PS2, they became one of Sony's handheld developers. Syphon Filter got two PSP games, released in early 2006 and late 2007, and they both were as well received as any handheld shooter games could reasonably be before the Vita. People praised the presentation, controls, and multiplayer for both games, and they were also ported over to the PS2. And in 2009, to wrap up their PSP career, they release Resistance Retribution. Gametrailers gave it a 9.4/10, tied for the best rating they gave to a handheld game that generation.

More recently, Bend released the Vita launch title Uncharted: Golden Abyss, which was one of the most technically impressive handheld games ever created. They are currently working on a PS4 game, Days Gone, which is due for release this year. It's the upcoming zombie game that's not Last of Us 2.

All things considered, not a bad way to recover from Bubsy 3D.

This thread is largely dead, but I can't help myself.

There was once a studio founded in California back in 1996. Their first game was released in 1998, was a hockey game called Olympic Hockey 98 released under Midway. Thing was, this project was essentially a two year old game with the famous hockey player's endorsement removed. They literally did the thing where annual sports games are the same thing with a new logo, down to having the same cheat codes as in 1996. The 1996 original wasn't even that well received back in 1996, being overshadowed by hockey games from EA, Virgin Interactive, and Sony. It is officially the lowest rated game ever on IGN, which gave it a score of 0/10, and even the relatively kind-hearted reviewers called it "shameless attempt to make money."

Treyarch would go on to develop NHL 2K3 and NHL 2K5, possibly the best rated Hockey games ever released from anyone outside EA. They also released the Dreamcast and Xbox versions of the first two Tony Hawk games and then Spider-Man 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops. Their name? Albert Einstein Treyarch.