What defunct retro game publisher do you miss the most?

I miss Midway the most. I miss their over-the-top arcadey style games, especially in the sports genre. That style of games has become very rare since Midway went out of business. Nowadays, everyone is trying to make their games more and more realistic, which I think often makes them less fun, instead of going the opposite direction to make their games as fun and over-the-top as possible like Midway used to do.

Sunsoft mainly for their developed/published titles on the NES, the main highlights being Batman, Blaster Master, Freedom Force, Journey to Silius, Super Spy Hunter. (yes the published a few Midway games on the NES) They did release some good stuff in the 16/32 bit areas as well but not as much, and they came back and released one game on the Wii(Blaster Master Overdrive). I don't think that game did well and they are basically dead at this point.

Another would be Working Designs for bringing Lunar, Growlanser, Popful Mail, Alundra, Thunder Force V, and others to the west. They went belly up in 2005.

LucasArts, without a doubt. They released so many of my favorite games of all time, and they pretty much defined PC gaming for me in general.

I'm glad to see their adventure games getting rereleases now as I had missed most of them.
They have plenty of good stuff besides Star Wars like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Metal Warriors, Herc's Adventures, etc. Recently I played a bit of Outlaws (wild west PC FPS) which seems fun so far.

Lucasarts

pre-2010's Konami

I miss Midway the most, but mostly because they were the company I was supposed to end up working for when I got out of college. Fuckers had to go belly up right before I could start my internship, classmate of mine got in a semester before they closed, I bet that shit was tough but awesome too!

Looking Glass Studios.

They were(and still are) my favourite developer and made some of my favourite games/franchises of all time,such as Ultima Underworld,System Shock and Thief. They were one of those few development houses that were truly ahead of its times,both from a game design standpoint and technologically. The last day of the company before closing forever is a really sad affair.

Origin Systems,Sensible Software,Westwood and Infogrames are some others that I fondly remember.

Same.

Definitely Midway. THQ kind of hurt too.

Though they are technically still around, Interplay and SNK hardly make anything new nowadays.

Not a publisher but a developer named Quintet. They made some of the best SNES games including Actraiser, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. It actually never officially closed its doors, they just went quiet and disappeared in the early 2000's.

I still need to play some of their games.

If including developers I would also say Quest of the Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre series.

@Eikichi-Onizuka: I highly recommend that you do. Those three games that I mentioned before are serious classics.

I've played Actraiser and Illusion of Gaia. Still need to check out Soul Blazer, Robotrek(which doesn't seem as highly regarded but still looks interesting), and Terranigma. I've heard I'm not missing much with Actraiser 2.

@Eikichi-Onizuka: Terranigma is amazing. I find it hard to get into most jrpg´s from that era these days(especially squaresoft ones because of the combat),and I only played it first two years ago.
I´d go as far as to say that its the best snes jrpg I played and perhaps even the best game on the system. It holds up remarkably well,aside from the first hour or so.

Squaresoft

Probably Midway. Also really miss THQ and 3DO.

Yeah I also miss Midway as well. Too bad they are gone now.

Take your pick...

I kind of miss Hudson Soft and Ultra.

Bullfrog and Maxis

Lucasarts

Origin (back before EA ruined the name)

Squaresoft (before the merge with enix)

Midway (wouldn't have remembered this but the other posts reminded me)

Bullfrog Productions
Pandemic Studios

Great (and interesting) picks as Ultra was essentially just a fake company within Konami (who bought Hudson Soft) used to get around Nintendo's publishing rules.

I'll throw in DataEast as my vote.

Awesome topic!

There are so many :-( I'll throw out Psygnosis, Maxis, LucasArts, and Looking Glass as some favorite devs/pubs that are no more

Pandemic Studios :(

Data East