Toys for Bob is an American video game developer based in Novato, California. As the creators of the award-winning Star Control and Skylanders series, the studio was founded by Paul Reiche III, Fred Ford, and Terry Falls in 1989. The name of the company was created by Laurie Lessen-Reiche to stimulate curiosity, without referring to a specific person.
Reiche and Ford each attended the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s, before entering the video game industry in the early 1980s. Reiche and Ford later met through mutual friends in 1988, when Reiche was seeking a programmer to develop Star Control for Accolade. This led to the creation of their studio in 1989, and the debut of Star Control in 1990. The release was considered a landmark science fiction game, and led to the 1992 sequel Star Control II, which greatly expanded the series' story and scale. Star Control II is celebrated as one of the greatest games of all time, and is featured on several "best of" lists for music, writing, world design, and character design. Through the late 1990s, Toys for Bob developed several games for Crystal Dynamics, including The Horde, Pandemonium!, and The Unholy War. In the early 2000s, the studio transitioned to working on licensed games (particularly for The Walt Disney Company), and parted ways with Crystal Dynamics. Soon after, Activision became their new publisher, and eventually acquired the studio in 2005.
Toys for Bob created the Skylanders series when Activision merged with Vivendi Games and got the Spyro franchise. The developers at Toys for Bob had already been experimenting with toy-game interaction, and felt the technology would be ideal for Spyro's rich universe of characters. The 2011 release of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure was considered a technological and commercial breakthrough. This led to a spinoff series with several successful games, generating a billion dollars in revenue for Activision in the first 15 months, and winning several awards. In 2018, Toys for Bob assisted with the development of the modern re-makes of the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Spyro Reignited Trilogy.
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