Selene’s looping adventure evolved with new gameplay modes when the Returnal Ascension DLC launched last week. The team at Housemarque is thrilled to create new ways for fans to play the challenging-yet-rewarding, arcade-inspired shooter on PS5. In fact, iterating on satisfying gameplay is deeply ingrained in the studio’s culture, starting back in 1994.
I am sure that not everyone reading this blog is aware of our long history as a studio, so please continue to find out more about our story and how we ended up launching Returnal and becoming part of the PlayStation Studios family.
Whether Returnal was your first introduction to Housemarque, or you have played some of our previous games, you might not know that we are the oldest game studio in Finland, founded just a few months before our friends at Remedy, creators of the Alan Wake series and Control.
But how did Housemarque come to be, and how did we end up being part of the PlayStation Studios family?
90s Demoscene Origins
Before Housemarque, there were Bloodhouse and Terramarque, two gaming studios headed by Harri Tikkanen and me respectively, both with deep roots in the 1990’s gaming demoscene. In 1995 me and Harri decided to join forces and our studios, and that’s how Housemarque was born.
Housemarque Studio Head Ilari Kuittinen
The demoscene was formed around hobbyists called demo groups, creating tech demos with the best visuals possible and pushing the limit of the hardware available at the time, and Finland had a strong demoscene community, developing on systems such as Amiga, Commodore, Atari, and more. Local game developers took part in it, because it was just the coolest thing to do back then; many of them were young and still studying. This was the pre-gaming industry in Finland, and likely one of the drivers in its beginning. But even with such a thriving community, the game development industry was still quite small in Finland: it was difficult to make games and actually complete them. Many games ended up in game development limbo for a year or even more. That was the reason why Housemarque got its start.
In December 1994 myself – Ilari Kuittinen – and Harri Tikkanen sat down and had our first serious chat about joining forces, as we had already known each other because of the small size of the game industry, where everybody knew everybody else. We quickly reached an agreement and in June 1995 we decided to create a new gaming studio. We chose to name it Housemarque, as the combination of our companies: Bloodhouse and Terramarque.
Super Stardust (Amiga, Amiga CD32, 1994 | PC, 1996)
Enter Housemarque
The first games we released as Housemarque – a year after its creation – were Alien Incident (1996), a point-and-click adventure game, and Super Stardust on PC (1996), a space shooter that was the beginning of our arcade roots, and a game we are still proud of to this day. Super Stardust was originally developed by Bloodhouse and released on Amiga and Amiga CD32 in 1994. These games were just the beginning of Housemarque’s story.
True to the local gaming culture of the time, we wanted to create an incredible experience with limited hardware, while also pushing the b