The Guild Houses
51 publishers and studios. The chart shows each house’s lifespan — when it was founded, and whether it still stands.
Publishers
Tabletop companies
Digital studios
Every house
Milton Bradley Company
America's great family-game maker, from The Checkered Game of Life in 1860 to Twister and Simon, which in 1989 teamed with Games Workshop to put a plastic dungeon in toy stores with HeroQuest.
Nintendo
A Kyoto playing-card maker turned console giant, Nintendo built the machines the Japanese RPG grew up on and published Zelda, Fire Emblem and Pokémon.
George Allen & Unwin
The London house that took The Hobbit on a ten-year-old's recommendation, gambled on The Lord of the Rings with a profit-sharing deal, and published Tolkien for more than half a century.
Puffin Books
Penguin's children's imprint, born in 1940, which put Narnia and The Hobbit into British children's pockets and in 1982 published The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, launching Fighting Fantasy.
Bantam Books
The mass-market paperback giant that published every original Choose Your Own Adventure book, 184 titles that let a generation pick the page, and later launched George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Ace Books
The New York paperback house of back-to-back Ace Doubles whose unauthorized 1965 Lord of the Rings lit the Tolkien boom, and which later launched Thieves' World and, in 2024, Dungeon Crawler Carl in print.
Avalon Hill
The Baltimore company that turned the wargame into a consumer product with hex maps and cardboard counters, and whose board Outdoor Survival supplied the wilderness maps of the first Dungeons & Dragons.
Ballantine Books
Ian and Betty Ballantine's New York paperback house that won the 1965 Tolkien war, invented the Adult Fantasy shelf and spun off Del Rey, turning a cult professor's romance into a mass-market genre.
Sega
The arcade and console maker that answered Dragon Quest with Phantasy Star, put the first successful online RPG on a console, and now owns Atlus, home of Persona.
Flying Buffalo
Rick Loomis's Arizona company that turned play-by-mail wargaming into a business with a Raytheon minicomputer, then gave Tunnels & Trolls, the first rival to D&D, a home and invented the solo adventure.
TSR, Inc.
The Lake Geneva basement partnership that printed 1,000 copies of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, grew into a $40-million-a-year publisher, and collapsed under its own debts in 1997.
Chaosium
Greg Stafford's Bay Area 'house of chaos' that gave the hobby RuneQuest, the percentile Basic Role-Playing system, Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon, and survived half a century of near-collapses.
Enix
A real-estate advertising firm turned game publisher, Enix found its stars through a 1982 programming contest and used them to make Dragon Quest, the game that taught Japan to love the RPG.
Games Workshop
Three friends' London mail-order business that imported D&D to Britain, launched White Dwarf and Fighting Fantasy, then built Warhammer into a miniatures empire now worth a place in the FTSE 100.
Del Rey Books
Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey's Ballantine imprint, launched in 1977 with The Sword of Shannara, which proved that Tolkien's readers would buy long epic fantasy series by the million.
Sierra On-Line
Ken and Roberta Williams's company in the California foothills that invented the graphical adventure, built the fairy-tale kingdom of Daventry in King's Quest and published Ultima II.
Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)
A Silicon Valley wargame publisher that won TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license in 1987 and turned it into the Gold Box, the most faithful D&D computer games of their era.
FASA Corporation
The Chicago company, named for a Marx Brothers joke, that built BattleTech's giant robots and Shadowrun's cyberpunk elves, then closed its doors in 2001 while still solvent.
Iron Crown Enterprises
A Charlottesville company named after Morgoth's crown that built the crunchy Rolemaster system from college house rules and held the Middle-earth roleplaying license from 1982 until its 2000 bankruptcy.
Steve Jackson Games
The Austin company behind pocket-sized Ogre and Car Wars, the do-everything GURPS, the gamer parody Munchkin, and a 1990 Secret Service raid that helped create the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Tor Books
Tom Doherty's New York house, founded in 1980, that bet on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere and became America's largest science fiction and fantasy publisher.
Nihon Falcom
A small Tokyo-suburb studio that helped invent the action RPG with Dragon Slayer, then spent four decades making Ys and the Trails saga for a devoted audience.
Palladium Books
Kevin Siembieda's Detroit-born publisher whose 'Megaversal' rules tie together fantasy, superheroes, mutant turtles and Rifts, a post-apocalyptic Earth where every genre pours through dimensional tears.
Sir-Tech Software
The small family publisher on the New York–Canada border that shipped Wizardry in 1981, set the template for the party-based dungeon crawl, and saw its creation become a legend in Japan.
Bard Games
A tiny company started by three friends with $600 apiece that turned house-ruled D&D into the Compleat books and the Atlantean Trilogy, then gave the hobby Talislanta.
Electronic Arts
The publisher that sold games like rock albums, put The Bard's Tale in stores, then bought Origin, Westwood, Mythic and BioWare: EA owned a remarkable share of computer-RPG history.
Interplay Productions
The Irvine house that gave the world The Bard's Tale, Wasteland and Fallout, then published Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment before collapsing under debt in the early 2000s.
Origin Systems
The Garriott family's Texas studio, born in a Houston garage in 1983, that made the Ultima series and Wing Commander, gave the CRPG a conscience with the Avatar, and launched Ultima Online. Its motto: 'We Create Worlds.'
New World Computing
Jon Van Caneghem's Southern California studio, which grew from a one-man Apple II epic into the Might and Magic role-playing saga and the turn-based strategy phenomenon Heroes of Might and Magic.
Westwood Studios
A Las Vegas studio that made SSI's real-time D&D dungeon crawler Eye of the Beholder and its own Lands of Lore before inventing the modern real-time strategy game with Dune II and Command & Conquer.
Bethesda Softworks
A Maryland sports-game shop that stumbled into Tamriel: Bethesda turned The Elder Scrolls into the defining open-world fantasy RPG series, from Arena's endless dungeons to Skyrim's snowbound everywhere.
FromSoftware
A Tokyo business-software firm turned maker of cruel, beautiful dungeons: FromSoftware's Souls games made difficulty an art form and gave the RPG a new genre, the soulslike.
Square / Square Enix
The Tokyo studio that bet its survival on a game called Final Fantasy, then spent two decades reinventing the Japanese RPG before merging with its great rival Enix in 2003.
Game Freak
A hand-stapled gaming fanzine that became a studio, Game Freak turned Satoshi Tajiri's boyhood insect collecting into Pokémon, the monster-catching RPG that conquered the world.
Wizards of the Coast
A basement start-up near Seattle that invented the collectible card game with Magic, bought the bankrupt-bound TSR in 1997, and has owned Dungeons & Dragons ever since.
Blizzard Entertainment
Three UCLA graduates' port shop that became the house of Warcraft and Diablo, and then built World of Warcraft, the online fantasy world that took the MMORPG mainstream.
White Wolf Publishing
The 1991 merger of a magazine and a game studio that launched Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness, made gothic-punk horror the hottest thing in 1990s gaming, and pulled roleplaying toward story.
CD Projekt / CD Projekt Red
Two Warsaw friends who started out reselling imported games built the company that turned Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher into one of the most acclaimed RPG series ever made.
Turbine
The Boston-area studio that built Asheron's Call, put Dungeons & Dragons and then Middle-earth itself online, and kept The Lord of the Rings Online alive long enough to outlast its own name.
BioWare
Three doctors in Edmonton built the Infinity Engine, revived AD&D on the PC with Baldur's Gate, and made the companion-driven story RPG the defining Western form for two decades.
Fantasy Flight Games
Christian Petersen's Minnesota publisher of lavish, component-heavy board games, from Twilight Imperium and Descent to licensed Star Wars and Lord of the Rings card games: a flagship of the hobby-game boom.
Mythic Entertainment
A small Virginia online-games shop that turned Arthur, Celtic myth and Norse saga into three warring realms: Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot made realm-versus-realm war the heart of an MMO.
Black Isle Studios
Interplay's in-house RPG division, named for a Scottish peninsula, which made Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale and put its name on BioWare's Baldur's Gate games.
Larian Studios
A stubborn Belgian independent that spent two decades making Divinity games on a shoestring, crowdfunded its way to Original Sin, and then made Baldur's Gate 3, the RPG that conquered the mainstream.
NCSoft
The Seoul-born publisher whose Lineage filled Korea's PC bangs with castle sieges, then went west to buy ArenaNet and Richard Garriott's team and become one of the world's great MMO houses.
Sony Online Entertainment
Verant Interactive built EverQuest, the dungeon-crawling online world players nicknamed EverCrack; as Sony Online Entertainment and then Daybreak, it has kept Norrath running for more than a quarter-century.
Jagex
The Cambridge studio behind RuneScape, the browser-based world of Gielinor that gave a generation of children their first MMO and, reborn as Old School RuneScape, still thrives a quarter-century later.
Paizo
The Seattle-area company that took over Dragon and Dungeon magazines in 2002, lost them in 2007, and answered by building Pathfinder, the game that kept D&D 3.5 alive and outsold D&D for a time.
Obsidian Entertainment
The Black Isle diaspora's second act: an Irvine studio that wrote sequels for other people's worlds, crowdfunded Pillars of Eternity, and became the conscience of the talky, reactive computer RPG.
Free League Publishing (Fria Ligan)
The Stockholm studio that grew from rescuing two Swedish RPGs in 2011 into a crowdfunding powerhouse behind Tales from the Loop, Forbidden Lands, Mörk Borg, Dragonbane and the second edition of The One Ring.
Cephalofair Games
Isaac Childres's Indiana publisher whose crowdfunded Gloomhaven, a colossal box of cooperative campaign dungeon crawling, spent more than five years as the top-rated game on BoardGameGeek.