exodus Honestly I don’t know! Spellbound and Mimimi are (or were, in the case of Spellbound) both German companies so it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume they do, but there is definitely no overlap between Pyro Studios and Spellbound or Mimimi. Can’t find anything conclusive, even though I feel the DNA shared is pretty obvious.
One that came to mind sharing staff would be the line connecting the Stalker games to Metro. 4A was founded when a lot of the key staff from GSC Game World (Andrew Prokhorov, Oles Shyshkovtsov, and Alexander Maximchuk) split and created their own studio, which has nevertheless specialized in developing the very same type of slavic postapocalyptic sci-fi shooter with the Metro franchise.
I was thinking, there is something definitely going on with Shinji Mikami. Once he “invented” the over the shoulder camera, all of his games have revolved around that same idea in one way or another. There is God Hand, Vanquish, The Evil Within and Shadows of the Damned, if you want to count it (I don’t know how involved he was with the actual development).
What about Tokuro Fujiwara with the Ghost and Ghouls - Tomba connection? This one is maybe a stretch but there is a lot of influence between those games I think, the SD style of character design, how the jump and the weapons work, general aesthetic, etc.
This is fun to think about! I’ll keep putting thought into it and see what I come up with.