Welcome to the Companies wing of the Shacknews 2023 Hall of Fame class. This category celebrates the publishers, developers, and other entities that have influenced the direction of the industry and brought joy to millions of players.
When you're finished, use the Table of Contents at the bottom of the page to visit other areas of the Shacknews Hall of Fame Class of 2023.
Being a custodian to the operation and maintenance of the entire Internet sounds like an astronomical task. In fact, it could arguably be considered an impossible one. However, ensuring the global stability of the most widespread form of communication and electronic interaction in the world is a must and, since 1998, it has fallen heavily to the efforts of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). An American non-profit organization, but with observers and advisors based in numerous global companies and organizations, the ICANN has maintained the internet as we know it in a variety of ways.
Since its inception, ICANN has overseen policy and maintenance of the internet through a variety of supporting organizations, including the Address Supporting Organization, Domain Name Supporting Organization, and Protocol Supporting Organization. The ICANN’s work resulted in the development and handling of the Domain Name System (DNS). Its facilities also included managing Internet Protocol (IP) address spaces for IPv4 and IPv6, as well as the assigning of address blocks to regional internet databases and registries.
As the Internet grew, so did the need for ICANN, as well as a need for global organization and support of its efforts. The group was formed out of a proposal by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that demanded improvement of the technical management of Internet domain names and addresses. It has been responsible for the establishment and management of global IP addresses and top-level domains, such as .eu, .asia, .travel, and many more.
The ICANN has not been without controversy. Until 2016, its business and authority were contracted by the US Department of Commerce, which many have considered to be a conflict of interest to the global mission of the group, calling for “One World. One Internet”. Even so, the ICANN’s policies and operation are affected by a global group of advisor and observer organizations that play watchdog to the group. Some of the groups involved include the Council of Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO), INTERPOL, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the World Trade Organization. With these safeguards in place, and its identity as a non-profit organization, the ICANN doesn’t always get it right, but arguably, the Internet might be untenable or even broken without this organization’s efforts.
Before Google had dominance of the search engine space, and before even Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and other engines were even competing, there was another reliable search engine operating in the Internet’s consumer infancy. AltaVista was once a force to be reckoned with in the search engine space. Established in 1995, AltaVista was the first searchable, full text database to utilize a simple query UI.
A spinoff of the Digital Equipment Corporation, AltaVista was first developed by Paul Flaherty, who designed the original concept, as well as fellow engineers and developers Louis Monier, who created AltaVista’s World Wide Web crawler, and Michael Burrows, who crafted the engine’s search indexer. Once AltaVista was up and running, Digital Equipment Corporation spun it off into its own company with Ilene H. Lang acting as CEO.
By 1998 AltaVista was receiving double digit millions of search queries a day. It was run by 20 64-bit multi-processor machines, utilizing around 130GB of RAM and 500 GB of disk drive space. It also became capable of limiting search results from a domain, resulting in the ability to reduce duplicate results from the same website. It also utilized a highly minimalist design that kept webpages and subtext as the priority results listed from any given query. AltaVista became massively popular following its launch. By 1998, it was the 11th most visited website in the entire world, according to Tech.co.
AltaVista was on top of the mountain for quite some time, but it couldn’t keep the top spot forever. The company was sold to Compaq in 1998, who was hoping to compete with Yahoo! in the search engine space. However, a series of expansions such as shopping and email failed to pay off and Google ended up gaining more ground. When the Internet bubble collapsed, AltaVista was one of the groups that felt it worst. Compaq had sold its stakes in the company and AltaVista tried and failed to launch an IPO. In rough shape, AltaVista was eventually acquired by a parent company that was then acquired by Yahoo!. In 2010, Yahoo! shut down AltaVista as it consolidated its business.
While it would fail to find ground as other search engines outmaneuvered it, AltaVista was still an incredible success for a time, providing the foundations of an easily searchable Internet. Google and Yahoo! may have eventually overcome the services provided by AltaVista, but there’s still a great deal of groundwork this early engine laid for modern internet searches and results.
Combined and ranked search results and data may sound like common sense in modern internet tools today, but there was a time when it was the hottest new thing in technology, and one of the projects pioneering that path in the 1990s was MetaCrawler. Originally launched in 1995, MetaCrawler was among the first metasearch engines to be created, combining search results from several other search engine into one compiled and ranked page of results.
MetaCrawler was created by then-University of Washington student Erik Selberg and Professor Oren Etzioni as a PhD graduate project. The original purpose of the project was to create a service that gathered results from various web search engine programs for the purpose of studying the structure of the World Wide Web. What they found was that the gathered results made MetaCrawler a particularly useful searching tool in general. After its launch in 1995, MetaCrawler was accessing six sources, Galaxy, InfoSeek, Lycos, Open Text, WebCrawler and Yahoo!, and answering around 7,000 a week. By 1998, the search engine was answering to 275,000 daily visitors.
One of the difficulties of MetaCrawler was that Selberg and Etzioni had a difficult time monetizing it. Due to that difficulty, ownership of the engine changed hands several times over the years. By 2016, it would eventually find its way to OpenMail, now known as System1.
In 2017, MetaCrawler was relaunched as its own search engine, void of several monetization gimmicks that had been attached to it over the years. Over the course of its existence, it has combined search results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, and LookSmart, just to name a few. It may not be the first search engine one might think of, but its contribution to technology paved the way for comprehensive ranked results that are simply a part of our everyday internet lives.
IO Interactive is synonymous with Hitman, the stealth franchise that it created and reinvented on more than one occasion. It's impossible to overstate the influence that Hitman has had on stealth games since its debut in 2000, with Agent 47 becoming a modern gaming icon, and IO Interactive's assassination game being the benchmark that others in the genre are measured by.
The modern trilogy of Hitman games, referred to as the World of Assassination trilogy, once again proved that IO Interactive were still the kings of the genre. After going solo and self-publishing their most recent effort, the Hitman IP is flourishing like never before. While IO Interactive has seen little success outside of the Hitman franchise, the studio has an opportunity to take another massive step with its upcoming James Bond game, currently codenamed Project 007.
Though it’s had some incredibly tumultuous times throughout its history, Yahoo is one of a handful of games from the dot-com boom of the 90s to still be standing today. Offering news, search, and email functionality, Yahoo was the home of many people’s first email addresses. Yahoo has also managed to diversify itself with verticals for finance, sports, and various aspects of entertainment.
Prior to Google’s dominance in the search engine space, WebCrawler was one of the first ways to search for information on the internet. It’s managed to hang around since its 1994 founding, providing web, images, video, and news search functionality. The website’s 2018 redesign brought it up to date with some modern changes and a logo refresh. While it may have been outpaced by rival search engines, WebCrawler has managed to stay in the game for nearly three decades.
It’s hard to remember a time when Google didn't exist. For so many users, it has been omnipresent across a host of services, from email and word processors to a short-lived cloud-based gaming platform. Before all of that, Google was a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students interested in designing a search engine, that began in 1996. (A third individual, Scott Hassan, was their lead programmer, but left the project before Brin and Page founded Google.)
Their project became the internet’s de facto search engine. Although Google Search remains at the heart of the company’s offerings, it’s expanded to email, GPS navigation, cloud-based gaming and storage, video streaming, language translation, operating systems that power the company’s titular Chromebook laptops, and much more.
Through the 1980s and most of the ‘90s, video game publishers were run by marketers and executives who cared more about profit forecasts than about making great products that reached players. Mike Wilson, a former biz guy at id Software and the CEO of Ion Storm, announced Gathering of Developers (later called GOD Games) as a publishing house owned and operated by game developers who understood the needs of development studios.
Gathering of Developers strived to make publishing fun and welcoming. Instead of operating stuffy booths at trade shows like E3, they hosted barbecues and provided live music and beer to visitors who stopped by for interviews and to preview games made by the studios under GOD’s umbrella. The company’s publishing catalog included Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (Epic MegaGames), Railroad Tycoon 2 (Westlake Interactive) Age of Wonders (Triumph Studios/Epic Games), Oni (Bungie), Max Payne (Remedy), and cult-favorite first-person shooters such as KISS: Psycho Circus (Third Law Interactive) and Heavy Metal: FAKK (Ritual Entertainment).
Anyone who browsed the internet through most of the ‘90s should remember Microsoft’s dominance thanks to Internet Explorer, its web browser embedded through its Windows OS. Members of Netscape—the company whose browser, Netscape Communicator, was one of Internet Explorer’s main competitors—went on to found Mozilla, a portmanteau of “Mosaic” and “Godzilla.” Mozilla’s initial purpose was to provide technology to companies such as Netscape; when Netscape parent company AOL decreased its involvement in Netscape, Mozilla took over and created a suite of products, each designed for specific functions, such as Thunderbird for email and the Firebox web browser.
Mozilla’s Firefox grew rapidly and became the alternative browser of choice for many users frustrated with Internet Explorer. It was faster, more secure, and offered add-ons to expand its functionality. When it released in 2004, Firefox racked up 60 million downloads over nine months and, in 2009, overtook Internet Explorer 7 in popularity and usage. Mozilla deserves credit for, among other things, encouraging other companies to throw their hat in the web browser ring. Firefox is the fourth most popular browser behind Google Chrome (the dominant choice), Safari, and Microsoft Edge, successor to Internet’s explorer and as of this writing the least popular solution.
Most well-known for its gaming-focused computer hardware, Razer Inc. is a “lifestyle brand” targeted at video game players. Many users recognize its eye-catching mechanical keyboards with lighting modes and gaming mice replete with buttons that can be mapped to perform virtually any in-game function.
Razer also makes headsets, game controllers, the Kishi controller aimed at mobile devices, laptop computers, and “Razer Gold,” a currency offered across over 42,000 games. The company has found a sweet spot between affordability and quality, leading to countless gamers around the world enjoying its products and services.
Based in New York City and with locations around the world, Rockstar Games is one of the most prolific and influential developers in the world. Although known primarily for Grand Theft Auto, the world’s best-selling video game franchise, Rockstar has published, developed, or otherwise been involved in titles such as Midnight Club, Manhunt, Max Payne, Oni, The Warriors, Bully, Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire, and more, cementing its reputation for influence and quality.
The ubiquity of Rockstar Games intellectual property has led to other projects. The company produced movies such as The Football Factory, launched the CircoLoco Records label, and a club night called Rockstar Loft. In December 2023, it unannounced Grand Theft Auto VI, set for release in 2025 and sure to further Rockstar Games’ influence.
Founded in 1997 and one of a select number of websites to survive the dot-com bubble, Priceline.com remains one of the world’s most popular choices for discount rates on travel and travel-related services such as rental vehicles, vacation packages, and hotels. It was launched as Name Your Own Price. Over time, Priceline.com expanded to operate in over 200 countries and has partnered with hundreds of airlines and hundreds of thousands of hotels.
In the long-ago days of brick-and-mortal businesses focused on video game sales, GameCrazy was one of Gamestop’s biggest competitors. GameCrazy started as a “store within a store,” connected to rental outlet Hollywood video as a place to buy, sell, and trade game software and hardware. It stood apart from competitors by allowing customers to play a video game before purchasing it. There were 634 GameCrazy locations in 2006, many of which were standalone stores. In 2010, GameCrazy and its parent company Movie Gallery filed for bankruptcy, but its try-before-you-buy policy coupled with most stores being connected to then-popular rental outlet Hollywood Video, set it apart from outlets such as GameStop.
Founded in 1998 and located in Redmond, Washington, Nintendo Software Technology (NST) is a first-party studio that makes games targeted at the North American market. Their first title, Bionic Commando: Elite Force, launched on Game Boy Color in 1999. Other hits followed, from Ridge Racer 64 and Pokemon Puzzle League for Nintendo 64, to Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 on Nintendo DS, to specialty items such as the 2003 The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition, a GameCube title that included Zelda and Zelda II for NES, and Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask for N64.
Nintendo Software Technology developed 2023’s F-Zero 99 for Nintendo Switch Online, and is set to release a remake of Mario vs. Donkey Kong on Nintendo 64 in 2024.
DMA Design is a London-based studio that turned heads with the release of its Lemmings series of titles from 1991 through 1994. In 1997, it developed Grand Theft Auto, a stark contrast in tone and subject matter than its Lemmings series. Arguably the studio’s biggest title prior to being acquired by Rockstar Games was 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III, considered one of the greatest games of all time, and a major influence on open-world game design.
Since its acquisition and subsequent renaming to Rockstar Games North, the developer has released a litany of classics such as GTA: Vice City and San Andreas, the Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories GTA titles for Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), GTA IV and V, and Manhunt. As part of the Rockstar Games family, it aided in the development of other Rockstar titles such as Max Payne 3, L.A. Noire, and Red Dead Redemption, to name a few.
NetZero rose to prominence when it acquired, FreeInet, the first provider to offer free internet to subscribers, in 1998. It attracted over one million users over six months, and offered free internet in exchange for real-time ads that targeted users as they used their browser. Other companies noticed NetZero’s success and copied its model. As of 2012, the company still had approximately 750,000 dial-up subscribers.
For decades, Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett Packard offered a range of computers and services that catered to the needs of a wide array of users. Their mid-range PCs were perfect for general usage such as web browsing, email, and productivity software, making them a hit in living rooms, offices, and college dorm rooms. Many mid and high-range models targeted PC gamers.
Other than Packard Bell, perhaps no brands were more influential with home and business computers than Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett Packard during their heyday.
Where companies such as Dell, HP, and Gateway built computers that catered to the largest possible userbase, Cyberpower PC, Alienware, and Falcon Northwest targeted players by offering premium hardware at prices ranging from affordable to exorbitant. Despite those high price tags, consumers got their money’s worth. These three brands, by far the most popular from the ‘90s through today (although Dell acquired Alienware and sells gaming PCs under that branding), offered the latest and greatest hardware for gamers who wanted to be on the cutting edge. You can even customize every component of your PC, from cooling supplies and RAM types to motherboards, keyboards, mice, and included software.
Although co-founder Peter Molyneux became a lightning rod for controversy, that didn’t prevent Bullfrog Productions from becoming one of the most influential designers of computer and video games from its founding in 1987 through its acquisition by Electronic Arts. Bullfrog targeted hardware such as the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and personal computers running MS-DOS. In terms of consoles, it developed for everything from Game Boy and Sega Genesis to Sega Master System and TurboGrafx-16.
Some of Bullfrog Productions’ most popular titles included Populous, a “god game” heavy on strategy (and ported to SNES by Imagineer to great acclaim), the RPG Syndicate, the irreverent strategy title Dungeon Keeper, and amusement industry-style games such as Theme Park and Theme Aquarium.
Retro Studios was established in 1998 as a subsidiary of Nintendo. Its first title was Metroid Prime, a first-person shooter-style action-adventure game and the first Metroid to shift the perspective from side-scroller to first person. Retro received great acclaim for the title’s atmosphere, exploration, and action. Metroid Prime flourished into a franchise with 2004’s Metroid Prime 2, 2006’s Metroid Prime Hunters on Nintendo DS, and 2007’s Metroid Prime 3 on Nintendo Wii.
Nintendo passed its Donkey Kong torch from Rare to Retro, leading to 2010’s Donkey Kong Country Returns on Nintendo Wii. A sequel, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, followed in 2014 for the Wii U. In 2023, Metroid Prime Remastered gave the 2002 classic a graphical touch-up and control schemes suited to Nintendo Switch. It pitched in on development for Mario Kart 7 on Nintendo DS and is working on Metroid Prime 4 as of this writing.
Founded as Electronic Arts Redwood Shores (after its location in Redwood Shores, CA), the studio that became known as Visceral Games was known primarily for the action-survival horror-themed Dead Space franchise. Prior to crafting derelict spaceships haunted by reanimated corpses, Visceral Games developed other EA-branded games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2000 through 2007, expansion packs for The Sims, and The Godfather and its sequel, among many others.
