Sony Closes WipEout Developer Studio Liverpool

RogueyWon writes "Eurogamer is reporting that Sony has closed its subsidiary developer Studio Liverpool. Beginning its life in 1984 under the name Psygnosis, the development house has played an important role in the history of computer and video gaming, publishing classics such as the Lemmings series. Since its acquisition by Sony in 1993, the studio has been best known for its work on the WipEout franchise, which helped to establish the PlayStation console as a successful brand. Sony's statements indicate that it will seek to find positions for staff in its other development houses, but that some redundancies will be necessary." Eurogamer posted an update, indicating that the studio was working on WipEout for the PS4.

RIP Psygnosis

[logicassasin]

Shadow of the Beast, The Killing Game Show, and Awesome were my favorite Atari ST and Amiga games ever. Stunning graphics (for the time), unparallelled music, great game play out of their games. RIP to the greatest studio of my youth. ... BTW, has anyone ever completed Shadow of the Beast 2 WITHOUT using the "ten pints" cheat?

Re:"Some redundancies will be necessary"

[jareth-0205]

"Some redundancies will be necessary"

You mean, those redundancies will be deemed unnecessary, and therefore eliminated. Hate to be a wording nazi, but that's bad.

This is a UK-ism... a 'redundancy' is a job that has been made redundant, and therefore terminated. It's a common phrase here.

Re:RIP Psygnosis

[Dogtanian]

grab an Amiga emulator, the roms for the three games I mentioned and play them (also include Shadow of the Beast 2 and 3). Come back and let us know if you still believe this.

The problem with asking someone to do this is that if you weren't there at the time (as I assume the OP wasn't), you probably wouldn't get how technically impressive such games were. Even people like me who came to the Amiga later on were spoiled by the increase in standards that those earlier games forced. For example, I recently saw a video of Xenon 2, a game I remember hearing described as technically brilliant when I had my Amiga but never actually saw then. I really wasn't that impressed- the graphics were good for the time, but the music was no better than countless tracker modules and the chrome effect title page lettering? Meh.

I do remember seeing (and hearing!) an Amiga on TV circa 1986 and being blown away by its sampled sound, but most of my expectations were formed at a baseline circa 1991/92.

If you never even played an Amiga at the time it was current, let alone having played the games in question back then rather than 20 years on, it's going to be impossible to really *feel* how they would have blown people away at the time.

Also, I've never played Shadow of the Beast, but I've heard that it was notoriously difficult.