How Ripstone is thriving as an independent publisher by not growing too fast
A significant part of Liverpool’s games industry can be traced back to Psygnosis, which made its name with publishing titles like Shadow of the Beast and Lemmings before it became a subsidiary of the newly-formed Sony Computer Entertainment in 1993. Its new parent helped make it an international player, with the studio's Wipeout being one of the early killer apps for the original PlayStation.
Even after the subsidiary was renamed Studio Liverpool in 1999 and Sony XDev was also formed in the same site in 2000, you could still find traces of the Psygnosis around the offices that no one had bothered to remove.
That’s one little tidbit that Ripstone’s co-founder and creative director Phil Gaskell shares during a media visit of the Liverpool-based studio in the city’s start-up district, known as the Baltic Triangle, located just above a trendy arts bar. Having started his career at PlayStation and Psygnosis in the late '90s before rejoining as a producer at XDev, he’s very much part of that Psygnosis heritage, as is fellow co-founder and Ripstone’s managing director Leo Cubbin.
"It was a watercooler moment – well, a copy machine moment to be exact – when we both got chatting and both had the same desire to set something up," Gaskell explains. "I'd worked quite extensively in digital distribution, working on a lot of PSN games. Leo had just finished up as the external producer for LittleBigPlanet 2, which was very much about creative content being uploaded and shared digitally. So we hatched a plan to set up as a publisher, and I wrote the business plan when I went away on paternity with my second child."
Founding Ripstone in 2011 turned out to be good foresight when Sony announced the closure of Studio Liverpool the
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