High Impact Games

» see highimpactgames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

High Impact Games was formed in 2004 by people who had left Insomniac Games, with Roberto Rodriguez as president, and the plan from the start was to make Ratchet & Clank games that would fit on a handheld. Sony published the first one. Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters arrived on PSP in February 2007 and a PlayStation 2 version followed a year later.

Secret Agent Clank in 2008 was an original entry in the series, with Clank as the lead and Ratchet stuck in a prison subplot for most of it. Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier in November 2009 did the same job for Naughty Dog's series, and it is the last PlayStation franchise High Impact was handed.

Everything after that was licensed work. Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension for Disney in 2011, DreamWorks Super Star Kartz in November of the same year, help on the Wii build of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, two iOS games with a publisher called Moxy Games, then Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure in September 2012. A Crash Team Racing remake was canceled in 2010 and an original project called The Oddities never got out of the building.

The studio closed in November 2012. No announcement survives anywhere. The last post on the company news page is dated 25 September 2012 and it is about the Disney Princess game being out now.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the treehouse ~

Insomniac had a habit of hiding a museum inside its games, a room of cut content with developer commentary attached to it. High Impact took the idea with them and built a treehouse into Size Matters, reachable as a secret area, stocked with things that did not make the final game and notes explaining what happened to them. They did it again in Secret Agent Clank.

The company website ran on the same image. The homepage was a photograph of a treehouse, and the about page described the place as a club house for hardworking people rather than a corporate office with meetings and middle management. It also said they were not looking for a corporate cash-out.

~ the licensed years ~

The arc from Ratchet & Clank to Disney Princess is the ordinary one for a mid-size studio in the late 2000s. Handheld and secondary-console work was a real business while the PSP and the Wii still had install bases, and the studios doing it got paid per project by whoever held the license. Super Star Kartz and a Phineas and Ferb tie-in are what that business looks like near the end of it.

The news page records the pace without meaning to. A note from November 2011 about Super Star Kartz says it was very tough schedule-wise to make it happen. In January 2012 the studio announced it had started making iOS games alongside the console work. Eleven months after that there was no studio.

The PSP in Turkey was a modified machine almost by default, loaded off a memory card, and the games arrived as folders with no box and no developer credited on the back of anything. A studio name does not survive that trip. The people here who put forty hours into Size Matters filed it under Insomniac, which is where I had it filed too until I went looking.

~ the site is still up ~

highimpactgames.com resolves in 2026 and serves the page it served in 2012. The splash image is still the treehouse. The line across it is still there, about the dignity of game creators lying in their duty to keep awake the sense of wonder in the world. Every link in the navigation bar works.

The jobs page reads, in full, that they are not hiring currently, with an email address underneath. The team page still carries the joke biographies, including the one about Rodriguez hiding in cupboards around the treetop studio, but a line has been added above them reading alumni included. That line was not there in 2012. Somebody went back after the closure to change the tense, and has been paying for the hosting ever since.

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