Sucker Punch Productions

Sucker Punch Productions was founded in October 1997 by six colleagues from Microsoft: Brian Fleming, Chris Zimmerman, Bruce Oberg, Darrell Plank, Tom Saxton and Cathy Saxton. Zimmerman had grown disenchanted with his job and suggested to Fleming and Oberg that they start a games company. The name came from a list of project codenames they had failed to get approved at Microsoft. Zimmerman's wife advised against that one in particular, but they chose it anyway because it suited the young male audience games had at the time.

Its first game, Rocket: Robot on Wheels (1999) for the Nintendo 64, was self-funded, and finding a publisher was hard until Ubi Soft signed it. Critics liked it, but sales were poor. For the next project the team went straight to Sony: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002), starring a raccoon thief, did better on PlayStation 2 than the studio had expected. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (2004) and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (2005) followed, the latter made in just eleven and a half months.

It then changed direction with Infamous (2009), a comic book-inspired superhero story and its first open-world game. After Infamous 2 (2011), and more than a decade of working with the company, Sony announced in August 2011 that it was buying the studio for an undisclosed sum, making it part of SCE Worldwide Studios. Next came the standalone expansion Festival of Blood (2011) and Infamous Second Son (2014) for PlayStation 4, set in the team's home city of Seattle, plus its expansion Infamous: First Light.

For its next game the studio turned to feudal Japan. Ghost of Tsushima (2020), with a samurai lead, took around six years to make and became one of Sony's fastest-selling new intellectual properties. In 2021 its directors, Jason Connell and Nate Fox, were made tourism ambassadors for the island of Tsushima. The sequel, Ghost of Yōtei, set around Mount Yōtei, came out on PlayStation 5 on 2 October 2025. The studio is based in Bellevue, Washington, and is part of PlayStation Studios.