Bend Studio, which was previously known as Blank, Berlyn & Co., Inc. and Eidetic, Inc., is an American company that creates video games. It is located in Bend, Oregon, and was founded in 1992. The studio is most famous for making the games Bubsy 3D, the Syphon Filter series, and Days Gone. Since 2000, Bend Studio has worked directly with Sony Interactive Entertainment as part of PlayStation Studios.
History
Marc Blank and Michael Berlyn started a company called Blank, Berlyn & Co. in 1992. Blank had worked at Infocom, where he helped create games, and Berlyn had also worked at Infocom before joining Accolade. Blank was contacted by a California company after an employee remembered that Infocom had made games and used a software called Cornerstone. The company wanted to create a "sound-oriented game machine for cars," and Blank suggested making sports games that sounded like radio broadcasts. This idea was not made into a product, so Blank changed it into a football video game that felt like a TV broadcast. In 1992, Blank shared this idea with Berlyn, asking if Accolade would be interested in making the game.
After the 1993 release of Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, Berlyn took a break from Accolade. Around this time, Blank and Berlyn began making games under the name Blank, Berlyn & Co. Blank became the leader of the company. Their first games were Columbo's Mystery Capers and Dell Crossword Puzzles, released in November 1993 for the Apple Newton by StarCore, Apple’s publishing label for the Newton. Two more games, Dell Crossword Puzzles and Other Word Games and Motile, were released in June 1994. Arnie Katz of Electronic Games said these games were very successful. Later, Russ Wetmore, who worked on Preppie! II, joined the company after working at Apple for seven years. Wetmore helped create Live Action Football, a game that used ScriptX technology to be released on both Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems. Accolade published the game in November 1994 as the first in a planned series of sports games. The next game in the series was meant to be a baseball game.
After these releases, Blank, Berlyn & Co. decided to grow the company. In April 1995, the company changed its name to Eidetic and hired Christopher Reese as the technical director. Under the name Eidetic, the company made Bubsy 3D, their first console and 3D game, with a team of about eight people. Reese said moving to 3D was very difficult. Bubsy 3D was released in 1996 for the PlayStation but was not successful, as Reese said it competed with Crash Bandicoot. Later, 989 Studios, a part of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), asked Eidetic to make Syphon Filter, an action and stealth game. John Garvin, the creative director, said SCE trusted Eidetic because it had experience with PlayStation development and already had a game engine to use. Making Syphon Filter was hard because Eidetic had no experience with stealth-action games. The company grew to thirteen people, but Berlyn left because he was unhappy with the video game industry and the type of game Syphon Filter was. The game faced delays and changes, and was almost canceled several times. Despite these problems, 989 Studios producer Connie Booth believed in the project. Syphon Filter was released in 1999 and sold over one million copies.
Eidetic continued making Syphon Filter games for SCE, creating six more until 2007 without any other releases. In 2000, SCE bought Eidetic and renamed it Bend Studio. Bend Studio wanted to make games for a different franchise and decided to create a Resistance game for the PlayStation Portable because Resistance and Syphon Filter had similar themes. Bend Studio made a demo of the game and showed it to SCE producers and the original Resistance developer, Insomniac Games, who approved the project. The game, Resistance: Retribution, was released in 2009. After this, Bend Studio worked on Uncharted: Golden Abyss for the PlayStation Vita. After some ideas were rejected by the franchise’s developer, Naughty Dog, they agreed to Bend Studio’s plan and approved the project. Bend Studio worked closely with Naughty Dog and used assets from Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. They also worked on Uncharted: Fight for Fortune with One Loop Games.
Bend Studio’s first original game after Syphon Filter was Days Gone, released in April 2019 for the PlayStation 4. John Garvin and the game’s director, Jeff Ross, left the studio by December 2020. Garvin said the company fired him because he had a "disruptive personality." Bend Studio later said it was not involved in Garvin’s complaints on Twitter, where he blamed "woke" reviewers for the game’s average reception.
As of June 2021, Bend Studio was working on a new game that used the open-world systems from Days Gone. In June 2022, Bend Studio introduced a new logo. In January 2025, Sony canceled Bend Studio’s live-service game, which had been in development since 2021. In June 2025, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg reported that Bend Studio had laid off 30% of its staff (about 40 employees). Sony confirmed the layoffs but did not say how many people were affected.