Sucker Punch Productions
Sucker Punch Productions, LLC is an American first-party video game developer based in Bellevue, Washington. It is best known for creating character action games such as "Sly Cooper", "Infamous", and "Ghost of Tsushima" for PlayStation consoles. Sony Computer Entertainment acquired the firm in 2011, making it a part of PlayStation Studios. By 2020, the company employed about 160 people. Sucker Punch Productions was founded by Brian Fleming, Chris Zimmerman, Bruce Oberg, Darrell Plank, Tom and Cathy Saxton in 1997. The founders all worked at Microsoft before joining the video game industry. Despite having a difficult time  finding a publisher to fund them, their first project, "", was released in 1999. While it did not perform well commercially, it was well received by critics. The critical success of "Robot" encouraged the team to develop another platform game named "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" (2002). The team approached Sony Computer Entertainment for the game's publishing. It was an unexpected commercial success and spawned a franchise with two sequels: "" (2004) and "" (2005). After working on three "Sly Cooper" games, the team continued its partnership with Sony and pivoted to making an open world comic book-inspired superhero game  titled "Infamous" (2009). The game was a modest success and Sucker Punch followed it up with two sequels, "Infamous 2" (2011) and "Infamous Second Son" (2014). After the release of "Infamous 2", Sony acquired Sucker Punch for an undisclosed sum. Following the release of "Second Son", the studio spent six years working on the next game, "Ghost of Tsushima" (2020), which went on to become one of Sony's fastest selling original games for the PlayStation 4, selling more than 5 million copies. History. Founding and "Rocket". The company was founded in October 1997 by Brian Fleming, Chris Zimmerman, Bruce  Oberg, Darrell Plank, Tom Saxton, and Cathy Saxton. The founders first met while working at Microsoft. Zimmerman was "disenchanted" with his career in Microsoft and wished to do something different, and decided to approach his co-workers Fleming and Oberg to discuss his idea about starting a video game company. The brand name came as one of several proposed by the company they did not use at Microsoft due to policies. Chris Zimmerman showed the options to his wife for her opinion, but she did not care "as long as it isn't 'Sucker Punch'". The team went against her  advice since the target audience for video games at that time was mostly young men. After the establishment of the studio, the team began working on their first game. Seeing the huge successes of games like "" on the PlayStation, the team felt that they did not have the necessary skills or the experience needed to compete with them. Therefore, they decided to develop their new game for Nintendo 64 instead. Codenamed "Puzzle Factory", their first game was inspired by a computer game named "The Incredible Machine" and would have featured 3D visuals. However, the plan was scrapped. Two of the  founders, Tom and Cathy Saxton, left in 1998. After purchasing a development kit from Nintendo, the founders began self-funding a platform game named "Sprocket". The founders pitched the project to publishers after it was halfway through production as they thought it would be less risky. The team pitched to publishers including Activision and Acclaim Entertainment, but most of them were not interested. The team also pitched to Sony, though it declined since "Sprocket" was made for the Nintendo 64, one of PlayStation's competitors. THQ nearly agreed to publish the game but the deal fell apart several weeks before  E3 1999. Electronic Arts once offered to sign a deal with Sucker Punch for a PlayStation 2 title, though it required the company to cancel "Sprocket". While the founders were pitching the project, development of the game progressed smoothly. A total of seventeen people worked on the game. "Sprocket"s production was nearly completed when Ubisoft agreed to publish the game after seeing positive press reaction to it. The project, which was later renamed "" following a trademark dispute, received generally positive reviews when it was released in 1999. However, it was not a commercially successful game, with Fleming describing the audience  response as "tepid". Section::::"Sly Cooper" success. Following the critical success of "Rocket", the studio wanted to work on another character action game. The project, titled "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus", stars a raccoon thief as its protagonist. According to Fleming, "the sight gag of a raccoon putting on a mask somehow seemed super funny to us". Learning from the frustrating process of pitching "Rocket" to publishers, Sucker Punch decided to approach a publisher first. At that time, the most successful platform games were the ones released by console manufacturers. Consequently, the team approached Sony, the manufacturers of the PlayStation  series of consoles, which agreed to publish the game for the PlayStation 2. Working with Sony allowed the team to streamline its development goals as there was not a need to develop and program the game for multiple platforms. Since the game was developed for young players, the team initially worried that having Sly Cooper be a thief would spread the message that stealing was acceptable. The writers remedied this by introducing Sly as a master thief who only steals from other thieves. "Thievius Raccoonus" are Latin words made up by the team. Plank left the studio during the game 's development. Development of the game lasted for 3 years. Creative director Nate Fox described the launch of "Sly Cooper" as a tense experience for the team because Sucker Punch was an unproven studio at that time, and they were unsure about whether the market would be interested in "such a wacko game". "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" was released in 2002 and was both a commercial and critical success. It sold about 1 million copies, surpassing the studio's expectations. "Thievius Raccoonus" success enabled the studio to pursue a sequel. Fleming said that the sequel was about Sly  and his companions collaborating with each other to "pull off strings of big heists", while Fox said that it was inspired by Hollywood heist films. To help differentiate the game from "Thievius Raccoonus", the sequel features improved gameplay and artificial intelligence, a larger cast of characters, and more open levels. "" was released in 2004 to generally positive reviews. It was followed by a sequel, "", though its development was rushed. The team only had 11 and a half months to complete its production. Despite this, the game received generally positive reviews when it was released in 2005. "Sly 3" was the  last game in the "Sly Cooper" series developed by Sucker Punch. The studio was not directly involved in the creation of "" (2013), which was developed externally by Sanzaru Games. Sanzaru had previously collaborated with Sucker Punch on "The Sly Collection" for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. Section::::"Infamous" and acquisition by Sony. The success of the "Sly Cooper" franchise elevated Sucker Punch's stature as a development studio, though the studio wanted to work on something new in order to stay relevant. The studio pitched four different projects to Sony, including a project named "Nasty Little Things" in which the  player character would summon little creatures from their tattoos and go on adventures with them, and a project named "Uncharted", in which the player character must survive on an island filled with dinosaurs. Sony ultimately greenlit "True Hero", in which the player have to make different decisions as a superhero. "True Hero", which would ultimately become "Infamous" had a development team of 60 people. Though the team could have opted to request the necessary funds from Sony to increase the team size and finish the game in two years, Fleming noted that Sucker Punch, which always only had one team  with a very focused goal, worked better with a smaller team size. It was initially pitched as a superhero game with gameplay that resembled "Animal Crossing", though this idea was scrapped six months later, and the game pivoted to become a superhero origin story inspired by comic books such as "" and "DMZ". It was also the studio's first open world game. Development for the game lasted for three and a half years. It received generally positive reviews and was a modest commercial success when it launched in May 2009 for the PlayStation 3. With the success of the first  game, the team began working on a sequel. "Infamous 2" was released in June 2011 to generally positive reviews. Sucker Punch was a second-party developer for Sony for more than a decade, and "Sly" and "Infamous" are both intellectual properties owned by Sony. It had been an independent company until August 2011 when Sony announced that it would fully acquire Sucker Punch for an undisclosed sum. With the acquisition, Sucker Punch also became part of SCE Worldwide Studios. The acquisition talks lasted for about two years. Fleming, commenting on the acquisition in 2013, added that Sucker Punch's nature  as a "one-team shop", the increasing team size, and its long history of collaboration with Sony, in particular its product development team at Foster City Studio, as the key reasons why Sucker Punch agreed to Sony's acquisition. With Sony's support and funding, the studio continued to make "Infamous" games, releasing the standalone expansion "" in October 2011. It quickly became PlayStation Network's fastest-selling game, until the record was later broken by "Journey" in 2012. Following the release of "Festival of Blood", the team commenced working on "", the next main game in the "Infamous" series. Sucker Punch  elected to set the sequel in their hometown of Seattle as they could draw from their personal experiences in the open world's design. It also replaces the series protagonist Cole MacGrath with a new character named Delsin Rowe. More than 110 people worked on the game, though the number was still considered to be small for a big-budget triple-A game. "Second Son" was released for the PlayStation 4 in March 2014. The game received generally positive reviews and was a commercial success, selling more than 1 million copies in nine days. Sucker Punch released a standalone expansion  titled "" in August 2014. The studio was hit with layoffs in the same month. Section::::"Ghost of Tsushima". Following the release of "Second Son", the team began brainstorming for their next game. Sucker Punch wanted to create an open world game with a large emphasis on melee combat. The team considered themes such as pirates and Scottish folk heroes, and a playable prototype named "Prophecy", which was created in 2015 or 2016 and leaked in 2020, is set in a steampunk Medieval city. The team ultimately decided that the game would be set in feudal Japan and feature a protagonist samurai . The art and the environment teams had a difficult time transitioning into the project as the game was a huge departure stylistically from the "Infamous" franchise, which has a "punk rock" aesthetic. Due to this, it had a significantly longer production time than other Sucker Punch titles, with development lasting for about six years. The game, titled "Ghost of Tsushima", was released in July 2020 as one of PlayStation 4's last first-party exclusive titles. It was a huge commercial success and quickly became one of Sony's fastest-selling new intellectual properties. It was reported in November 2020  that it has sold over 5 million copies. As a result of the game's success, two developers became tourism ambassadors for the island of Tsushima in 2021, and a film based on the game is in developement.