In 1994, a trio of university friends from Canada founded a toy company on $10,000 and a pantyhose-covered clod of dirt full of grass seeds.  Later, they would go on to produce the wildly successful Air Hogs line of air-powered flying toys which fully established their foothold in the toy industry.  Spin Master now licences, [...]

Starting as a Japanese jukebox rental and repair company in 1969, Konami first began to work on amusement machines and arcade games in 1973, releasing its first machine in 1978.  Konami was responsible for a number of classic arcade games such as Frogger, and also began producing home video games such as Gradius, Castlevania, Contra and [...]

Fantasy Flight Games was founded in 1995 as an importer of European comics.  The first foray of this young American company into the world of gaming came with the release of their first successful game, Twilight Imperium, in 1997.  Since then, they have published many more games, such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark and [...]

Ever since it was founded in 1980, Steve Jackson Games has been producing card, role-playing and board games from its headquarters in Austin, Texas (U.S.A.).  Their first games, such as O.G.R.E and Car Wars (termed microgames because of their size) were board, miniature and card games released in 4×7-inch Ziploc bags and were designed to be [...]

New Zealand company Battlefront Miniatures was formed in 1997 when Military Miniatures of New Zealand and Crusader Distributors merged.  While the distribution and retail businesses of the latter were later sold off in 2000, Battlefront Miniatures still produces high-quality scale miniatures and rulesets for its own miniatures wargame, Flames of War, released in 2002. Most [...]

Dream Pod 9 began as the game production arm of Canadian anime (Japanese animation) magazine publisher IANVS Publications, producing licensed supplements for existing gaming systems such as Cyberpunk 2020 and Mekton in the early 1990s.  In 1994, the game production division separated from IANVS and became an independent company called Dream Pod 9. The first [...]

Founded in 1920, Hasbro is an American company which began producing toys and games in the 1940s. Today, Hasbro is one of the largest world-wide producers and distributors of board games, including classics such as Stratego, Risk and Monopoly as well as other, lesser known games such as Axis & Allies and heroScape.  Hasbro’s games [...]

Privateer Press is a relatively new entrant in the miniature gaming market, having been founded in Washington, U.S.A. in 2000.  The Iron Kingdoms setting created by Privateer in which several of their games are set was first introduced in the Witchfire Trilogy of adventures for the D20 RPG gaming system (see Dungeons & Dragons).  This [...]