The History of Housemarque – from the Finnish Demoscene to PlayStation Studios

blog.playstation.com:

Selene’s looping adventure evolved with new gameplay modes when the Returnal Ascension DLC launched last week. The team at Housemarque is thrilled to create new ways for fans to play the challenging-yet-rewarding, arcade-inspired shooter on PS5. In fact, iterating on satisfying gameplay is deeply ingrained in the studio’s culture, starting back in 1994.

I am sure that not everyone reading this blog is aware of our long history as a studio, so please continue to find out more about our story and how we ended up  launching Returnal and becoming part of the PlayStation Studios family. 

Whether Returnal was your first introduction to Housemarque, or you have played some of our previous games, you might not know that we are the oldest game studio in Finland, founded just a few months before our friends at Remedy, creators of the Alan Wake series and Control.

But how did Housemarque come to be, and how did we end up being part of the PlayStation Studios family?

Before Housemarque, there were Bloodhouse and Terramarque, two gaming studios headed by Harri Tikkanen and me respectively, both with deep roots in the 1990’s gaming demoscene. In 1995 me and Harri decided to join forces and our studios, and that’s how Housemarque was born.

Housemarque Studio Head Ilari Kuittinen

The demoscene was formed around hobbyists called demo groups, creating tech demos with the best visuals possible and pushing the limit of the hardware available at the time, and Finland had a strong demoscene community, developing on systems such as Amiga, Commodore, Atari, and more. Local game developers took part in it, because it was just the coolest thing to do back then; many of them were young and still studying. This was the pre-gaming industry in