Sucker Punch Productions

• 1. Introduction

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  Sucker Punch Productions, a video game studio in Bellevue, Washington, took its name against the advice of a founder's wife. Chris Zimmerman had a list of names that his team had proposed, and failed to get approved, as project codenames at Microsoft. He read the options to his wife. She told him not to use Sucker Punch. He used it anyway. The reasoning was blunt. Games at the time were aimed mostly at young men, and the team felt the name would resonate with that audience. By 2020 the studio employed about 160 people and was known for character action games on PlayStation consoles. How did a handful of software engineers with no publisher and no funding get there? And what did they have to abandon along the way?

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• 2. Leaving Microsoft

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  In October 1997, six people who had met at Microsoft started a company of their own. They were Brian Fleming, Bruce Oberg, Darrell Plank, Tom Saxton, Cathy Saxton, and Chris Zimmerman. Zimmerman was the spark. He described himself as "disenchanted" with his career at Microsoft and wanted to do something different. He took the idea of a games company to his co-workers Fleming and Oberg.

  The first plan was modest in ambition but sensible in hindsight. Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee had just appeared on PlayStation, and the founders looked at it and felt they lacked the skills and experience to compete. So they aimed at the Nintendo 64 instead, with a project codenamed Puzzle Factory. It drew its inspiration from a computer game called The Incredible Machine and was meant to have 3D visuals. The plan was scrapped before it became a finished game.

  The team shrank in 1998, when Tom and Cathy Saxton left the company. Only four of the six founders remained to start over.

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• 3. The Sprocket Pitch

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  A development kit bought from Nintendo became the founders' first major purchase, and they paid for it themselves. With it, they began building a platform game called Sprocket, funded out of their own pockets. Once the game was about halfway done, they started pitching it to publishers, believing that approach carried less risk. Activision and Acclaim Entertainment were among those approached. Most of the publishers showed no interest.

  Sony turned the game down for a simple reason. Sprocket was built for the Nintendo 64, a rival to the PlayStation. THQ came close to signing, but that deal collapsed several weeks before E3 1999. Electronic Arts then offered a deal for a PlayStation 2 game. The catch was that Sucker Punch would have to cancel Sprocket first.

  Through all the rejections, the work itself went smoothly. A total of seventeen people worked on the game. When production was nearly complete, Ubi Soft agreed to publish it, after seeing how warmly the press had reacted. A trademark dispute then forced a new name, and Sprocket became Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

  Rocket reached stores in 1999 to generally positive reviews. Shoppers did not follow the critics. Fleming described the audience response as "tepid". Rocket would turn out to be the last Sucker Punch game to appear on a Nintendo console.

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• 4. A Raccoon Thief

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  "The sight gag of a raccoon putting on a mask somehow seemed super funny to us." That is how Fleming explained the idea behind Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. The studio had also drawn a lesson from the misery of Rocket's pitch. This time, the team approached a publisher before building anything.

  Fleming had noticed that the most successful platform games of that period came from console manufacturers. So the team went to Sony, which agreed to publish the game for the PlayStation 2. Aiming at a single platform helped the team keep its goals tight.

  The game was meant for young players, and that raised a worry. Would a thief hero tell children that stealing was fine? The writers answered by making Sly a master thief who steals only from other thieves. The title's odd phrase, Thievius Raccoonus, was a pair of Latin-style words the team made up.

  Development took three years, and Plank left the team during that time. Creative director Nate Fox remembered the launch as tense. Sucker Punch was unproven, and nobody knew whether the market wanted such a "wacko game". The game came out in 2002 and was a critical and commercial success. It sold about 1 million copies, well beyond the studio's expectations.

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• 5. Heists and Handoffs

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  Hollywood heist films shaped the sequel, according to Fox. Fleming put the goal differently: Sly and his companions would work together to "pull off strings of big heists". To set the follow-up apart from the first game, the team improved the gameplay and the artificial intelligence. It also added a larger cast of characters and made the levels more open. Sly 2: Band of Thieves arrived in 2004 to generally positive reviews.

  The third game was a scramble. For Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, the team had only 11-and-a-half months to finish production. Reviews were generally positive when it was released in 2005 regardless.

  Sly 3 closed Sucker Punch's own run with the series. The 2013 game Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time was made outside the studio, by Sanzaru Games. Sanzaru had already worked alongside Sucker Punch on The Sly Collection, which appeared on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.

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• 6. True Hero

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  After the Sly trilogy, the success of the series had raised Sucker Punch's profile, but the studio wanted something new to stay relevant. It pitched four projects to Sony. One, called Nasty Little Things, had the player summon little creatures from tattoos and go on adventures with them. Another, named Uncharted, had the player survive on an island filled with dinosaurs.

  Sony chose neither. It greenlighted True Hero, a superhero game in which the player makes different decisions. The early concept was oddly gentle, with gameplay resembling Animal Crossing. That idea was scrapped six months later. The game became a superhero origin story drawing on comic books such as Batman: No Man's Land and DMZ, and it eventually took the name Infamous.

  Infamous was the studio's first open-world game. A team of 60 people spent three years on it. It arrived in 2009 to generally positive reviews and sold nearly 2 million copies as of 2010. For a studio famous for a cartoon raccoon, that was a very different kind of hit.

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• 7. Under Sony's Roof

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  Infamous 2 was released in June 2011 to generally positive reviews. Two months later, in August 2011, Sony announced it would fully acquire Sucker Punch for an undisclosed sum. The talks had lasted about two years. Until then the studio had been a second-party developer for Sony for more than a decade, and Sly and Infamous were both properties Sony already owned.

  Fleming gave his reasons in 2013. Sucker Punch was a "one-team shop". Its staff was growing, and it had a long history with Sony, especially the product development team at Foster City Studio. All of that made the deal feel natural. Through the purchase, Sucker Punch also joined SCE Worldwide Studios.

  With Sony's backing, the Infamous line continued. Festival of Blood, a standalone expansion, came out in October 2011. It became the fastest-selling game on PlayStation Network until Journey broke the record in 2012.

  The next main game, Infamous Second Son, was set in Seattle, the team's hometown, so designers could draw on their own experiences of the city. Delsin Rowe replaced series protagonist Cole MacGrath. More than 110 people worked on it, still a small number for a big-budget triple-A game. Second Son came out for the PlayStation 4 in March 2014 and sold more than 1 million copies in nine days. Infamous: First Light followed in August 2014. The studio was hit with layoffs that same month.

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• 8. Into Feudal Japan

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  Pirates were one idea on the whiteboard after Second Son. Scottish folk heroes were another. The team knew it wanted an open-world game built around melee combat, and it also built a playable prototype called Prophecy, set in a steampunk city. Prophecy was made in 2015 or 2016 and leaked in 2020.

  In the end, the studio chose feudal Japan and a samurai hero. The shift was hard on the art and environment teams. Infamous had a "punk rock" look, and the new game was a huge stylistic departure. That adjustment helped stretch development to about six years, far longer than any earlier Sucker Punch game.

  Ghost of Tsushima launched in July 2020 as one of the last first-party exclusives for the PlayStation 4. It became one of Sony's fastest-selling new properties, with over 13 million copies sold by September 2024. In 2021, directors Jason Connell and Fox were named tourism ambassadors for the island of Tsushima. A film based on the game is in development.

  A sequel, Ghost of Yōtei, was announced in September 2024. The team had been inspired to set it around Mount Yōtei after several visits to northern Japan. It was released for the PlayStation 5 on the 2nd of October 2025. A further game, Ghost of Yōtei: Legends, is listed for 2026.

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