Ted Price, the founder and CEO of Insomniac Games, has announced he will retire after more than 30 years with the company on March 2025.
Owned by Sony, Insomniac Games is known for creating iconic game franchises like Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank, and the Marvel’s Spider-Man series.
Price’s departure is a rare happy event in the game industry where it’s still not often we get to see someone spend three decades in the game industry and retire of their own free will. And during that time, Price’s company excelled with titles that, in my opinion, got better and better with titles like the Spider-Man series.
Back in 2019, I interviewed Price about his 25 years in the industry.
He said he started Insomniac Games (first known as Extreme Software) in 1994. With Al Hastings and his brother, Brian, Price went to work on Disruptor, a science fiction shooter game that publishers repeatedly rejected. Price was down to his last $1,000. They started developing Disruptor for the 3DO, but that early game console started tanking. So Mark Cerny, a producer at Universal/Cerny Games, suggested they switch the game to the PlayStation, Sony’s fledgling game console.
Universal published Disruptor. It didn’t do well, but it led to more projects. The next game was Spyro the Dragon, which was a family-friendly platformer with a larger audience target audience than Disruptor. Spyro became a hit, and it’s still around today. Since then, Insomniac went on to bigger games, and now it has crossed its 25th anniversary as a company. Its games include Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, Fuse, Sunset Overdrive, The Unspoken, Song of the Deep, and most recently, Marvel’s Spider-Man series.
Asked how the company had weathered its 25 years in the difficult games industry, Price said in our interview in 2019, “What’s helped us weather the ups and downs of the industry is a commitment to collaboration across the entire studio. Transparency, where everybody knows what’s going on. The commitment to the philosophy that great ideas come from everywhere–as a studio, from the very beginning, we have always relied on an approach where we want everybody to take ownership of the creative process and contribute to it and solve problems as a group.”
He added, “This is not a company where you have one lead designer or one creative director telling everyone what to do. We never operated that way, and I don’t believe that it works well for a culture like ours, where so many different disciplines are working together to create magic. I feel like we’ve been very consistent, culture-wise, in an industry that tends to be inconsistent.”
That culture has produced leaders beyond Price. To fill the role, Insomniac is moving to a new leadership model with three co-studio heads: Chad Dezern, Ryan Schneider, and Jen Huang.
Price had a lot of heart that also made him a beloved figure in the game industry, as he was and still is a key contributor to the industry’s DICE Summit, put on each year by the industry’s Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. And he had courage as well. Price took a stand against President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from seven Muslim countries.
While other game developers issued tweets or sent emails to employees about Trump, Price took the extra step of creating a YouTube video, where he stood in front of a camera with all of Insomniac’s employees behind him. He made a plea not only to Trump but to gamers to stand in opposition to the policy. And Price, whose company made many popular games like Ratchet & Clank or Resistance, used the medium that gamers turn to just about every day, YouTube.
At the time during Trump’s first days in office in 2017, game developers from around the world issued statements and tweets criticizing Trump’s order banning refugees and barring citizens from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days. Trump also banned foreigners with U.S. permanent resident green cards from entering the country without vetting, and he permanently banned refugees from Syria.
“We at Insomniac Games stand united in strongly opposing President Trump’s immigration ban,” Price said in the video. “There’s no question these orders will harm us as a company and many of our team members. So we ask. Is this the American way? Is discriminating based on religious faith or national origin American? Absolutely not. This is a deplorable, discriminatory act that we and many others across the nation believe is patently unconstitutional. We have been, we are, and will always be a nation of immigrants. If you agree with us, please do something about it. … Join us in being a force for good and making your voice heard.”
That leadership is why we gave Price our second annual Visionary Award in 2019.
Insomniac Games also thanked everyone who checked in with Insomniac about the state of its employees and Burbank studio during the terrible Los Angeles-area fires.
“The fires have devastated the communities around us. We continue to focus on supporting each other and communicating daily with Sony Interactive Entertainment to provide the latest information and resources to everyone affected,” the company said.
The three leaders replacing Price said in a post, “Sharing the news that Ted is retiring from Insomniac Games is still just as emotional to type as it has been to think about. The three of us – Chad, Jen and Ryan – have worked closely with Ted for many years. He’s not just our leader, he’s our longtime friend. And a great one at that. Ted will be missed for so many reasons.”
The added, “One of the great things about Ted is his ability to inspire everyone around him to grow. Ted has also set the ultimate example of how to not just say the right thing, but to do it too. Both with our games and how we behave as leaders and as a studio.”
They said that seeing how Price has operated for decades has prepared them to take on the challenge of stepping into Ted’s enormous, canoe-sized shoes.
“None of us can nor should try to ‘be like Ted’ though – we must stay true to ourselves and our own leadership styles. However, it’s safe to say we’ll often think to ourselves, ‘What would Ted do?’ as part of our individual and collective decision-making process,” said Schneider, in the post.
“I started my Insomniac career during the PlayStation 2 era in studio marketing and communications, quickly shifting my role to become Insomniac’s first community director and helping establish the role within the PlayStation ecosystem,” Schneider said. “I joined Insomniac’s senior leadership team several years ago and have held multiple studio roles including Head of Franchise Strategy & Studio Relations. In that role I partnered with teams within and beyond Sony Interactive on how and when we talk about our games, including in-game creative integrations. More recently, I’ve served as Head of Brand & Leadership Strategy, which means I’m ensuring through communications, coaching and culture development that what Insomniac says to the world about itself and our games matches what we believe and how we act inside Insomniac.”
