Typhoon Studios

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

~ the obit ~

Typhoon Studios was founded in Montreal in February 2017 by Alex Hutchinson, Yassine Riahi and Reid Schneider, all three of them out of the big publisher-owned studios in Montreal. It announced its first game in December 2018. Journey to the Savage Planet was a funny first-person exploration game about a badly briefed employee cataloging an alien world for a corporation that did not care whether he came back.

On 19 December 2019, with the game still unreleased, Google bought the studio and folded it into Stadia Games and Entertainment, the first-party division meant to give its cloud streaming service something only Stadia had. Typhoon had 26 people at the time. The game shipped in January 2020 on PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One and shortly after on Switch, published by 505 Games, since the deal had been struck before Google arrived.

The Stadia version, an upgraded release called the Employee of the Month Edition, went live on 1 February 2021. That is the same day Google announced it was closing Stadia Games and Entertainment and shutting its internal studios. Everybody at Typhoon left the company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ bought in December ~

The fourteen months are the whole story. Google acquired a studio specifically to make exclusive games, let it finish nothing new, and closed the division before the first acquired thing had been on the platform for a full day. Nobody designed that timing to be funny, and it is funny anyway.

~ what came after ~

Hutchinson, Schneider and three others founded Raccoon Logic in Montreal in August 2021, with funding from Tencent. In the negotiation they kept the rights to Savage Planet and to the sequel Typhoon had been building inside Google, which is unusual. Revenge of the Savage Planet came out in May 2025, five years and one owner after the first one.

typhoonstudios.com still resolves, and it redirects to a Stadia page on google.com.

~ the part that did not reach here ~

Stadia never launched in Turkey. It opened in fourteen countries in 2019 and the list grew slowly and never included this one, so the entire platform reached this country only as coverage: the Founder's Edition controller, the arguments about input latency, the 4K claims. Typhoon was bought and closed inside a service nobody here could sign up for, and Stadia itself followed on 18 January 2023.

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