6 bizarre pairs of games you never knew were made by the same developer

There aren’t a great number of similarities between this cute puzzle platformer and the fastest selling entertainment product in history, but they were made by the very same company. DMA Design Ltd. was founded in 1988, and it wasn’t until 2002 that it became Rockstar North, the household name that it is today.

Actually, GTA’s record-breaking launch-night queues, full of single-minded acolytes with bloody chaos in their future, are at least superficially similar to DMA’s gleeful rodents of old, so I guess the legacy of the company’s early days is still intact in a round-about way. Either way, since the early 90s, the Edinburgh based company’s games have earned consistently high review scores, from Lemmings, to the N64’s Body Harvest and Space Station Silicon Valley. There must be something in the water up there.

Blizzard hasn’t always been the megalith of tactical, role-playing dominance it is today. It was originally founded in 1991 under the name Silicon & Synapse. In 1993 it released Rock n’ Roll Racing, a battle-racing game for the SNES and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. It was a great little game, now looked back upon it fondly for its MIDI instrumental versions of popular rock songs, and tight, nippy, isometric take on vehicular combat. There wasn’t any epic loot though.

It wasn’t long after Rock n’ Roll Racing’s release that the company changed its name to Blizzard Entertainment. StarCraft, Diablo, and Warcraft later, it’s a legitimate gaming superpower.

There’s an unwritten rule of videogame journalism that says can’t describe combat as “visceral” without sounding trite. So it's desperately inconvenient when a developer decides to put the word in their name, effectively legitimising its use when talking about its in-game violence. Visceral Games was founded as EA Redwood Shores in 1998, and changed its name in May 2009, just after the release of the first Dead Space.

The Return of the King film came out over a decade ago, and… Oh damn, there’s another thing that makes me feel old. Anyway, the game of the film was fairly well received, and after a few more decent, high-profile licensed games for EA, the company earned the right to make its own, original game. The rest is Necromorphic history. Though is it just me, or are some of those skittering, undead mutants a little reminiscent of Gollum from in a certain light?

Okay, a bit of bonus content on this one. You see Epic Games has changed its name twice. Founded originally as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, the studio only developed one game under that name, the top-down adventure game ZZT, powered by text-based graphics and famed for its powerful and versatile level editor. The following year, the company changed its name to the far cooler-sounding--in 1992--Epic MegaGames, shortly before gearing up to develop and publish a slew of titles.

Famously, upbeat platformer Jazz Jackrabbit was one of the earliest games worked on by Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski. Less obviously, Epic also made Jill of the Jungle, a series of early PC platformers, starting in 1992, designed to go up against the likes of iD Software’s Commander Keen franchise. Of course, now we know Epic as the highly successful creator of franchises like Gears, Infinity Blade and Unreal. Perhaps its consistent latter-day acclaim will persuade it to stick the ‘Mega’ back in its name soon. It’s bound to start sounding cool again eventually.

Everyone knows Naughty Dog as the creators of The Last of Us, Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted and Jak & Daxter, but the company existed long before any of its revered PlayStation franchises. It was actually founded way back in 1984 under the name Jam Software, only taking on its canine monicker 5 years later.

This is perhaps the most incongruous duo of games on this list, Math Jam being an educational game released for the Apple II in 1985. Alas, no visual record of the game seems to exists, so you’ll have to make do with the artist’s impression above. So yeah, from maths to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time just a few decades later. Who says high school academia is useless in the real world?