Blizzard.


Interplay.
Black Isle / Bioware.

Honorable mention goes to Valve, purely for CSS. And Eidos for Commandos (and of course Tomb Raider).

Edit: Oh, and EA do have some good games. Give me MoH or C&C Generals and I'l happily play it any day of the week.

[ 10-26-2005, 07:08 PM: Message edited by: RoSs_bg2_rox ]

Bioware is great. I do hope their next bit can top Jade Empire, though, it lacked... something. I miss the infinity engine.

Blizzard goes quickly to the top of my list, but I'm recently enamored with WoW, so it may be the endorphins talking.

Rockstar North

(Honorable Mention) Rare was awesome for a brief moment -- Goldeneye 64 and KI2.

[ 10-27-2005, 03:47 PM: Message edited by: Timber Loftis ]

(I have 8) [img]smile.gif[/img]

1. Bio Ware
2. Blizzard Entertainment
3. Infogrames
4. Looking Glass Technologies (Dead now)
5. Arkane Studios/
6. Bethesda Software
7. Floodgate Studios (where looking glass people are now)
8. CDProjekt

Here are mine.

PS: Interplay and Black Isle nolonger exist. :(

[ 10-27-2005, 04:22 PM: Message edited by: Ziroc ]

Valve
Bethesda
Microsoft Games

a lot of people confuse a publisher with a developer.

especially because of bg 1 2 and nwn.

Bioware is a developer. they made a little known game called infinity wars. Interplay is a publisher, when they got the d &d license, they paid bioware to make bg and they used their in house developer black isle to make icewind dale and planescape torment with the infinity engine.
so black isle and bioware are developers, and interplay is the publisher. You associate bioware with dungeons and dragons, but they just happen to be developing a d and d game when the license changed and they dont actually have anything to do with d and d.

interplay also got bioware to develop nwn using their mdk engine, with plans for nwn just like bg to make their own expansions to it. But they lost the d and d license to infogrames( atari) and atari published it, and paid different companies to make expansions for it.

Ok so atari is a publisher, ubisoft and vivendi are also publishers all from france. EA is a publisher, and maxis would be its in house developer

anyhow, I would say

1Black isle studios for fallout and planescape torment
2sir tech just for wizardry 8 thats all they needed to do theyre in the hall of fame
2new world computing for heroes of mm 3, although triumph studios for age of wonder was even better in a way in the same genre.

ooooh, i didn't realize they didn't haveta still be making games...

please put my favorite design team at the top of my previous list:

Looking Glass Studios

*sighs* i <3 my thiefsie/system shocksie games, i do. [img]smile.gif[/img]

V***V

1)SquareSoft
2)LucasArts
3)Blizzard

For me, they are (in no particular order):

Black Isle/Bioware - for the fantastic RPGs they made & I've played (BG1 & 2 incl expansions TOSC & TOB; Planescape: Torment, IWD 1 & 2) - all consistently good, relatively bug-free & mot importantly fun tp play!

Sid Meier, during his MicroProse days and now in Firaxis. He knows how to make games fun!!

Jane's - made some excellent flight sims which stayed a long time in my hard drive, F-15 & Longbow amongst them. Also had fun playing Fighter Anthology (incl expansion packs).

Sid Meier

Bioware

Rare


Or something like that.

Of the still active ones I'd go with:
Paradox (Europa Universalis and other grand strategy games)
Ascaron (fun trading games in Patrician and Port Royale series, but they all tend to play the same way)
Piranha Bytes (Gothic Series)
Bethesda (Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Daggerfall were both great, even if the latter hasnt aged well)

Historically I'd say Microprose Labs back around 1990 with Civ, Railroad Tycoon, Darklands, Sword of the Samurai, Pirates, Colonization and countless flightsims. The sheer number of quality titles over a long period was unparallelled in history, though many of these were due to a few truly great minds (Sid Meier is the most well known).

Magnetic Fields who developed light car games (Supercars and Lotus series) for the Amiga were also great.

Some of those may be publishers rather than dev teams (MPS labs?) but they are nonetheless the labels I associate with games of a consistently high quality.