A History of Housemarque Part II: The Rise & Death of Arcade
Following 2008’s Golf: Tee It Up!, Housemarque would retreat back into itself to continue working on new games as studios often do. However, while they would continue to be somewhat platform agnostic, it was in the next seven years of the indie powerhouse’s life that we would witness a period where things would shift. Four of the eight games to release over this period were released exclusively on PlayStation consoles, continuing where Super Stardust HD left off as far as creating a catalogue of SIE published titles. While the other half of the games in this period were released on other platforms, none of those platforms were seen as a collaborative effort with the studio nearly as much as their relationship with Sony. With the growing frequency of working with PlayStation, Housemarque’s name would start to become more synonymous with the company and the PlayStation ecosystem.
Two years would pass after Golf: Tee It Up!, and it would be eleven months into the next decade before Housemarque launched their next title, Dead Nation. Released for the PlayStation 3, Dead Nation received mostly favorable reviews from critics and users alike. As a top down twin stick shooter, something that the then saturated zombie shooter market had yet to see, Dead Nation was a breath of fresh air from a genre perspective alone. Critics also praised its gameplay, having it stand center stage with the game’s sharp and detailed environments. A Housemarque trademark by this point, these environments provided a sense of dread that all zombie titles certainly need while also providing a fun, albeit sometimes frustrating gameplay loop. Dead Nation landed itself on IGN's 2013 list of Top 25 PlayStation Network games. While this was not being worked on by Housemarque, it would go on to have subsequent releases on the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita in 2014.
Other than 2012’s co-developed Angry Birds Trilogy, which was released across every major system at the time, 2011 would mark the last year that any Xbox console would see a Housemarque game on the platform. This game came in the form of Outland, a side scrolling artistically driven action platformer. Outland drew inspiration from older titles in the same way earlier Housemarque entries such as The Reap did. Still drawing from those arcade roots, Housemarque found their inspiration in games like Ikaruga, which was exclusively released in Japanese arcades in 2001, and Metroid. However, despite outlets commenting on the games borrowed mechanics, those mechanics did not fate Outland to lack an identity and feel uninspired. Utilizing its unique mechanic of switching between light and dark energies, Housemarque’s newest title added its own flare into the action platformer genre that turned out to be just as much a pleasure to play as it was to look at.
The Meso-American inspirations in Outland’s art combined with the neon splashes in both the background and foreground environments paired beautifully with its “quick on your feet” gameplay. This made for a visual standout amongst its peers with Housemarque’s trademark tight, addicting gameplay taking center stage as usual. Christian Donlan, Author and Features Editor at Eurogamer potently closed his review of Outland that year with this notion - “As with Super Stardust and Dead Nation, Housemarque has once again proved it’s a fearsomely talented quick-change artist of a studio, able to take any genre and get to the guts of it quickly with a chilly efficiency. Don’t play Outland because you expect it to be charming and filled with personality, then: play it because of the swooping, speeding cleverness of its design. Play it for the craft.”
“Play it for the craft” is a quote that seems able to be said for all of Housemarque’s work. One thing that cannot be understated about Housemarque is their fundamental understanding of how good gameplay should feel and their ability to apply that understanding to any style or genre. Since the inception of the company and their first releases, gameplay has seemingly always been top tier no matter the review scores, no matter the sales, no matter the reception. The gameplay is always there. The folks at Housemarque seem to be masters of their craft in that regard, and that mastery would continue to show itself into the back half of the decade.
2012 would see the fastest return from Housemarque since the back-to-back releases of Alien Incident and The Reap in ‘96 and ‘97. Strangely enough though, these games would come in the form of an iOS app and a port of Angry Birds to consoles. Furmins, the physics based puzzle iOS game that eventually found its way onto the Vita the following year, followed by the aforementioned Angry Birds Trilogy. Interestingly enough, in an interview with Housemarque producer Sami Koistinen through Scandinavian games site Gamereactor, Koistinen mentions the studio's interest in getting into the mobile game business as early as the late nineties. While that business was still very much in its infancy at the time, Housemarque founded a spinoff company, Springtoys, to help bring mobile games to the leading service providers of the time. The company would eventually be disbanded, but the spirit of the venture could be seen in the creation of Furmins.
In 2013, much like twelve years earlier in 2001, we would once again find ourselves moving on from another expected apocalypse while also moving on from the previous generation of gaming consoles. The eighth generation of consoles would see the release of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, bringing them into the line of sight of every gamer who wanted the bleeding edge of console hardware. Housemarque would release their next game, Resogun, day and date with the brand new PlayStation 4 on November 15th of that year. Praised by critics and users alike, Housemarque had done it again. Resogun was a showcase for the new hardware that saw the studio going back to their arcade shooter roots and those two things alone were the key ingredients for making one hell of a launch title.
Similar to arcade classics like Defender (or to keep it in house Super Stardust HD), Resogun placed players in a starship battling enemies and dodging what can seem like an infinite onslaught of projectiles. However, this time Housemarque put players into a cylindrical battlefield and gave them the optional task of saving any remaining humans that were in the level. You could also do it all with a friend via online co-op. With a cavalcade of neon colors, particle effects, blaster fire, and enemies littering the screen constantly, all without even the slightest dip in framerate, players witnessed Housemarque utilize the horsepower of the new console’s GPU to crank their classic style up to eleven. The studio would even see Resogun nominated for an Action Game of the Year award at 2014’s DICE summit in Las Vegas. With all of these iterations and modernizations on a genre as old as the industry itself, the studio had kicked off what would eventually be the record-breaking lifespan of the PlayStation 4, with what many people called the best launch title of the generation and a must play for any PlayStation owner.
Every one of those PlayStation owners would have three years to trek through the next-gen bullet hell that Housemarque had served up in Resogun before their next title. The studio returns in 2016 with Alienation, a spiritual successor to their 2010 zombie shoot ‘em up, Dead Nation. One would assume it would be a challenge to put out a game, let alone multiple games, to consistently positive reviews and have them welcomed with open arms. It seems as if it was more of a challenge for Housemarque to create a product that wouldn’t be met with glowing reception. Alienation maintained its predecessor's DNA with RPG influences including classes, skill trees, and an emphasis on co-op action. This time around, the team at Housemarque had the ability to refine their previous recipe, only making it stronger. A faster pace, varied enemy types, and four player online co-op paired with the studio’s guaranteed tight gameplay and crisp visuals made it no surprise to me that Alienation received positive reviews. While some did have their gripes about the lack of unique weapons, the passive abilities of higher tier weapons and the age-old hunt for the next best piece of loot was enough to satiate the hunger of any gamer starved for an arcade action adventure that summer.
Housemarque’s dedication to classic arcade game design had been standing sturdy and being refined for twenty-two years at this point. Their obvious and self-proclaimed inspiration from games like Zaxxon, Defender, and games of that era made it even more poetic to me that their next title, Nex Machina, would be developed in collaboration with Eugene Jarvis, the lead designer behind Defender and Smash TV; the latter being a game that encompassed a good bit of my late childhood and early teenage years thanks to the PlayStation 2’s Midway Arcade Treasures. Nex Machina would be the first self-published title from Housemarque, and according to a blog post on the company's website, was Jarvis’ first co-operation with an outside development studio since 1994 when he worked on the Cruis’n series for Midway.
Nex Machina released on June 20, 2017 to unanimously positive reviews. The game’s main mode wasn’t dissimilar to prior games of its kind, seeing players blasting through crushingly difficult robot filled bullet hell arenas to a pumping synthwave soundtrack, all while constantly trying to beat their most recent high scores. The inclusion of a local co-op mode was a welcomed addition as well. While Resogun had an online co-op mode, real time strategy with your friends right there on the couch was a surefire way to ramp up the intensity of runs. Critics and consumers alike found the studio’s newest entry to their catalog to be more than just a love letter to the games of old. In classic Housemarque fashion, along with what an arcade-like veteran such as Jarvis brought to the table, Nex Machina felt like the logical next step for what the arcade shooter could look and feel like. So much, in fact, that it’s Housemarques highest rated game of the 2010s according to Metacritic. It is still praised by most, if not all who’ve played it.
In a mere two months after the release of Nex Machina the studio would release another game, Matterfall. Launching on August 15th, this was the fastest the studio had ever turned a game around, outdoing themselves from their 2012 releases of Furmins and Angry Birds Trilogy, as well as from their formative years with Alien Incident and The Reap. Matterfall didn’t wow audiences the way the collaborative effort with Jarvis did in Nex Machina, which was understandably disappointing to some. But it wasn’t to say the game was bad by any means. Matterfall saw Housemarque step into platforming again after six years. By definition Furmins was a platformer, yes, but this was territory that they had only tread to a similar capacity once before in 2011’s Outlands. The result was a competent, beautiful as always platform shooter. Most who reviewed it seemed to find all the things there were to love about a Housemarque title, but some found it lacking replay value to anyone that wasn’t a hardcore high score chaser. However, there could be an argument made that Housemarque’s approach to games inherently makes high score chasing a focal point; a cornerstone to the arcade genre they’d been inspired by for decades.
Matterfall maintained gameplay aspects that the studio made pretty regular throughout their history. Punishingly difficult twin stick shooting, the aspect of saving civilians, replaying runs solely to beat your last high score, and even augmentation slots were brought into the fold. While not being full on skill trees or as varied as classes, I thought of it as the smallest nod to the customization available to players in titles like Alienation or Dead Nation. Matterfall basically seems like a “Housemarque Sampler'' from what I've seen. A story light, action oriented game that focuses on all of the aspects the studio primarily implemented into their titles. While not being as groundbreaking as Resogun or Nex Machina, Matterfall still managed to impress and entertain most who played it, which is no surprise for a Housemarque title. As previously stated, the gameplay is always there. However, despite the release of Matterfall, bigger waves would be sent across the industry just six days later on August 21st. This is the day that Housemarque, the indie arcade powerhouse themselves, took to a blog post to boldly announce to their audience that “arcade is dead.”
Written by Justin Hyde