Ronimo Games

» see ronimo-games.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ronimo Games existed because a student project got noticed. A group at the Utrecht School of the Arts, calling themselves Banana Games, built a free PC game in 2006 about a blob that rolled through a gray city turning it colorful. THQ saw it, bought the rights to de Blob and handed the commercial versions to other studios. The students took the money from that sale and founded a company with it in 2007, naming it for a robot ninja monkey, which was what survived a brainstorming session that produced nothing better.

The first real release was Swords & Soldiers on WiiWare in May 2009, a side-scrolling strategy game with a sense of humor about itself, and it kept being ported for the next five years onto nearly every platform that would take it. Then came Awesomenauts in May 2012, which took the lane-pushing structure then overrunning the PC market and flattened it into a two-dimensional platform fighter. It arrived on PC and on both consoles of that generation, and it arrived despite its publisher being in financial trouble at the time.

Awesomenauts was the studio's life. New characters and balance passes kept coming for six years, a Kickstarter funded the Starstorm expansion, Overdrive followed in March 2016, and the last update shipped in July 2018. Seventeen people were doing this in 2015. The studio's final game, Blightbound, went into early access in July 2020 and launched properly a year later, and development on it stopped in March 2022 with known bugs left in, because Ronimo did not own the current-generation development kits needed to find them.

~ the case file ~

~ the games ~

Awesomenauts arrived in 2012, during the stretch when Turkey's lane-pushing audience sat on League of Legends in numbers that made everything else in the genre invisible locally. A 2D Dutch take on the format, sold on Steam at a price rather than given away with a shop attached, was never going to land in an internet cafe here. Ronimo's games had a different route to people, which was console download stores and Steam sales, and that route does not produce the kind of country-level presence League had.

What the games did have was a visual identity nobody else was renting. Hand-drawn, loud, cartoon-colored, funny on purpose, and consistent across every title it shipped, which is rarer in this industry than good design is. The studio's own logo was a gorilla in a box.

~ the day the court said so ~

On 22 August 2023 a Dutch court entered Ronimo Games B.V. into the national bankruptcy register. Nothing was posted to the studio's site, then or afterwards, by way of a farewell. The first the public heard of it was a notice on faillissementsdossier.nl, the Dutch registry that publishes these things automatically, and from there to the games press within two days.

The only words anyone at Ronimo offered came from a developer on the company's Discord server, unofficially: the team had been hit by a series of unfortunate events while working on its latest project, and had not been able to recover despite its best efforts. That project was never named and has never been shown. In October 2023 Atari bought most of the intellectual property, Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers included, so the games have an owner even though the studio does not have a successor.

The bankruptcy itself ended the way small studio bankruptcies usually end. The registry records the case being closed for want of assets and the bankruptcy lifted on 18 March 2025, which is the Dutch procedure's way of saying there was nothing to distribute and no point continuing. The domain has since been taken over by a content farm publishing automated articles about other people's games.

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