4Stack #5 — answers & breakdown

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Studios. The overlap risk is high here — plenty of Japanese studios are also famous, plenty of famous studios are owned by Microsoft — so the sorting rule has to be ownership and fate, not reputation.

The sixteen cards in this puzzle were: FromSoftware, Capcom, Square Enix, Atlus, Team Cherry, ConcernedApe, Toby Fox, Supergiant Games, Bethesda, Mojang, Obsidian, id Software, Telltale, THQ, Lionhead, Visceral.

The four stacks

Japanese studios

FromSoftware, Capcom, Square Enix, Atlus

Four Japanese developers with distinct house styles: FromSoftware's punishing action RPGs, Capcom's fighting games and Resident Evil, Square Enix's Final Fantasy line, and Atlus's Persona series.

Indie darling devs

Team Cherry, ConcernedApe, Toby Fox, Supergiant Games

Small teams with outsized impact. Team Cherry made Hollow Knight with roughly three people; Toby Fox wrote, composed and coded most of Undertale alone; ConcernedApe did the same for Stardew Valley.

Owned by Microsoft

Bethesda, Mojang, Obsidian, id Software

All four sit under Microsoft today, mostly via the 2021 ZeniMax acquisition (which brought Bethesda and id) and the 2014 Mojang purchase.

Studios that shut down

Telltale, THQ, Lionhead, Visceral

Studios that were closed or collapsed. Note that Telltale's name and assets were later revived under new ownership, so 'shut down' is doing some historical work here — the original studio did close in 2018.

Want to try it yourself? Play puzzle #5 — archive plays don't affect your streak. Or jump into today's puzzle.