This is a common occurrence in the music industry and I was wondering if it crops up in gaming. Can you think of any game developers who's first game was amazing and all of their later attempts to expand their brand failed?

Yes...

No.

Where Are They Now?

Remember 'Pong' - that wacky, catchy, can't-get-it-out-of-your-head game that you play on your TV set? Sure you do! Ever wonder where the creator of that game is now? Well, we did a little digging to answer your questions!

Allan Alcorn designed that one-hit wonder Pong, but, despite a long and fruitful career in the computer and computer gaming industries, he never did hit that success high like he did with Pong. He did have some "involvement" with the Breakout series of games, but that's about the extent of his gaming.

Let's hope he enjoys fondly remembering his glory days as much as the rest of us do!

Casey Casum, signing off!

trilobyte with "7th Guest"

the guys who made too human. their first game was a gem but then they went downhill. their recent game is one of the worst games ever (some xmen game on console)

Those developers, Silicon Knights, were responsible for the first Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness, those two games are pretty good.

their Xmen game was shit because during development they were focusing on making an eternal darkness sequel

During development they tried to Jerk around and Slack off with Activision and Activision call them out on their bullshit

The rest as they say, is history

me and my girlfriend...

Does Team Bondi count? Granted, they only made one game before going under.

What? Is that an expansion pack to the first one or something? Baldurs gate 1.5643 hell yez!

The guy who made Jet Set Willy on the spectrum he made like 3 games and disappeared off the gaming scene after that.

The guys who made King of Dragon Pass. I can't recall them doing anything else :/

Pterodon, kinda. They made the decent Flying Heroes, than they made the (IMHO) brilliant Vietcong but already the expansion pack dropped heavily in quality and Vietcong 2 was quite a low-budget mess. After that they were fully integrated into Illusion Softworks (now 2K Czech).

Also Reality Pump. They've made a lot of games, most of them decent but with Earth 2150 they delivered a masterpiece out of nowhere and they haven't been able to repeat that kind of success to date. Sure, they may have had bigger commercial success with their later games but they just haven't been able to create another game as original and refined as Earth 2150.

Also American McGee. Alice was his one brilliant work, after that he almost exclusively delivered trash (granted, I haven't played Madness Returns yet and apparently it wasn't bad but as far as I can tell it certainly didn't live up to the original).

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Smith_(games_programmer)]Matthew Smith[/url]