Lizardcube

Founded: 2015

Headquarters:

Paris, France

Lizardcube is a Parisian games studio founded by game industry veteran Omar Cornut and traditional comic/animation artist Ben Fiquet. It is known for the acclaimed remake of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, praised for its art style and retro engineering marvel, and Streets of Rage 4, for which it handled all art direction, animation and visuals.

History

Omar Cornut got this passion for retro Sega games that led him during the 1990's to create the emulator MEKA and the SMS Power! research and preservation community, which is still active. He developed the tooling UI middleware Dear ImGui used by many large industry actors today. Omar worked in Kyoto with Q-Games on the Pixeljunk Shooter series, in England at Media Molecule on the original Tearaway and early iterations of Dreams, and freelanced in Montpellier with Wild Sheep Studios on WiLD.

Ben Fiquet graduated from Gobelins School in Paris 2006, co-directing the animated short film Pyrats. Since then, he has been working in videogames (Soul Bubbles), writing his own comics (Powa, Les Chevaliers de la Chouette) and freelanced in animation between London, Paris and Los Angeles (Dreamworks, Zodiac Kids and many more).

They worked together on the Nintendo DS title Soul Bubbles released in 2008, a physic based game about blowing bubbles and transporting spirits. They kept in touch until the foundation of Lizardcube late 2015 to develop the remake of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, released in 2017 to critical acclaim. This gave them the opportunity to work on another popular Sega's old franchise along the studios DotEmu and Guard Crush Games, Streets of Rage 4 released in 2020.