Planet Moon Studios

Overview

Planet Moon Studios was a game development studio founded by Nick Bruty and Bob Stevenson in 1997 and located in San Francisco, California (USA). It originally consisted mainly of former employees of Shiny Entertainment. It existed for fourteen years and the studio worked with a variety of publishers such as Interplay, LucasArts, Electronic Arts, SEGA of America, Disney Interactive Studios, THQ and Majesco.

The company was initially mostly known for action titles that contain a lot of humour, such as Planet Moon's first game Giants: Citizen Kabuto (2000), and then Armed and Dangerous (2003) and Infected (2005).

Around 2004 the company announced to shift focus to development for Sony's PSP platform. Next to Infected the studio made After Burner: Black Falcon (2007) for the platform.

Around 2007 the focus shifted to Nintendo's Wii console and the Nintendo DS handheld system. The studio released the trivia game Smarty Pants (2007) for the Wii and the educational games Brain Quest: Grades 3 & 4 (2008) and Brain Quest: Grades 5 & 6 (2008) for the Nintendo DS. The musical rhythm game Battle of the Bands for the Wii was also released in 2008. In that year the independent iPhone game Booty Blocks was developed as well and some members of the team assisted with the development of Iron Man (2008 - PS3/Xbox 360).

After those, only two more games were released. The studio did the Wii version of 5TH Cell Media's Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (2009), and the movie adaptation Disney Tangled in 2010. Tangled also was the studio's first PC title since Armed and Dangerous in 2003.

On 11th January 2011 Bigpoint Inc. announced to have hired 37 people who formerly worked for Planet Moon, but did not acquire the company or the IP. According to Planet Moon CEO Aaron Loeb one of the company's projects went into financial default in December 2010 and they pursued litigation against the funders that owned the company money. Microsoft cancelled the light RPG/Adventure Xbox 360 Kinect game My Amazing Story and that meant the end of the company. Planet Moon was then closed in early 2011.

Co-founder Nick Bruty and Richard Sun went on and established the independent game development studio Rogue Rocket Games in March 2011. The other co-founder Bob Stevenson had already left the company to co-found ngmoco in June 2008. CEO Aaron Loeb joined Playfish in April 2011 as the new general manager of its San Francisco branch.

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