Housemarque Ltd.

The two founding members of the two Finnish game companies Bloodhouse Ltd. and Terramarque Ltd. established Housemarque Ltd. in early 1995. Both companies had developed games for the Amiga previously. As PC game markets really started to emerge after the collapse of Amiga manufacturer Commodore in 1994, Housemarque was established in order to take advantage of the growing PC game markets. The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland.

The studio started with the development of 3 PC CD-ROM titles: Super Stardust (1996), Alien Incident (1996) and The Reap (1997) from 1995 to the end of the fiscal year 1999. Although none of the games were commercial hits, they all received good reviews among the game press. Internationally distributed computer games were not the only products the company was doing. Other activities include the development of an on-line world called Con Quest, consulting for the Finnish National Lottery Company (Veikkaus) and small advertainment games.

In early 1999 Housemarque signed a contract with Infogrames to develop Supreme Snowboarding (known as Boarder Zone in the US) for PC CD-ROM. Sights were set for the Christmas release. As the game had been in development well before signing a contract with Infogrames, their snowboarding game had already gained some reputation being one of the most visually stunning games around. For instance, 3DFX showed the game at their stand at E3 1998 in Atlanta. Supreme Snowboarding was also one of the few games presented at the official launch event of Pentium III processors in February 1999. Intel presented the game at the Game Developers Conference in March.

After releasing TransWorld Snowboarding for the Xbox in 2002 as the sequel to Supreme Snowboarding the company released the snowboarding game Flo Boarding for Nokia's N-Gage in 2003, and started development on the internal technology for a PS2 title. In 2004 the karaoke game Staraoke was released for the PC. The following years more mobile games were released: The Chronicles of Narnia 3D (2005) for J2ME and BREW, and Gizmondo Motocross 2005 (2005) for Gizmondo. In 2007 they released Super Stardust HD as a downloadable game for the PlayStation 3, continuing its early series.

Since then the company has mostly been focused on downloadable games for the Xbox 360 and PS3, such as Golf: Tee It Up! (2008), Super Stardust Portable (2008) for the PSP, Dead Nation (2010) and Outland (2011). In 2011 the studio made its first iOS game Furmins and three Angry Birds games were ported to the PS3 and Xbox 360 as Angry Birds Trilogy (2012).

In 2014 Resogun was a launch game for the PlayStation 4 as a spiritual successor to the Super Stardust games. In March 2014 the 2010 title Dead Nation was released as an enhanced version for the PS4 as Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition.

Despite development for a wide range of platforms, the studio has always had close ties with the PlayStation console platform since the PS3 with exclusive titles such as Super Stardust HD (2007), Dead Nation (2010), Resogun (2013), Alienation (2016), Matterfall (2017) and Returnal (2021). On 29th June 2021 Sony announced the studio's acquisition as a first party developer part of the PlayStation Studios family.