Start My Own / Real Life

Arts

Arts

• In the art world of the 1860s, the Salon des Refuses was started in Paris by a group of artists, now referred to as the Impressionists, who were infuriated at being constantly rejected by the official Salon de Paris.
  • The Secession movement in Vienna, for much the same reasons.
• The Metropolitan Opera Company was founded by a group of businessmen who were annoyed by being unable to obtain box seats at the Academy of Music.

Business

Business

• Ferrari is involved in three examples:
  • First, inter-company politics in the early sixties led a group of engineers to jump ship and form their own company, ATS. Unfortunately, their first effort came across as lackluster and they folded after a couple of years. However, they were revived in The New '10s.
  • In the mid-sixties, Ferruccio Lamborghini, president of what was then primarily a tractor manufacturer, came to Enzo Ferrari to complain that his recently purchased Ferrari had a faulty clutch. He also explained that he had tried the clutch from one of his own tractors in the car and it worked fine. A fierce argument followed, and Lamborghini looked through his car some more and decided that his company already had the ability to make most of the necessary components for a luxury automobile. The rivalry continues to this day.
  • In 1963, Ferrari was desperate to secure funding, and the company entered serious talks with Ford about purchasing the company. When Enzo Ferrari learned that the Americans wouldn't allow him to keep control of the racing team, he broke off the negotiations. Ford (and Henry Ford Jr. in particular) was so incensed that they designed the GT40 specifically to challenge Ferrari's record in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The GT40 went on to win Le Mans four times in a row. This event was dramatized by the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari.
• Sean Combs was fired from Uptown Records during the early 90's. Afterward he formed his own label, Bad Boy Records. The latter is more or less still thriving while Uptown folded.
• Dave Thomas (the restaurateur, not the actor) made a name for himself as assistant to Colonel Harland Sanders. Had he stayed in line, Thomas would probably end up inheriting the reins of KFC, but due to personal disagreements with the good Colonel, Thomas struck out on his own and founded his own restaurant chain, which he named after his daughter Wendy.
• When Brazilian movie magazine SET was sold to a different publisher, one of the editors went to start its own publication, Preview. Both had a Fandom Rivalry until SET went under.
• Boyd Coddington's hot rod shop, Hot Rods by Boyd, faced bankruptcy in 1998. So, president Chip Foose left to form his own company, Foose Design. The two companies endured a fierce rivalry right up until Boyd Coddington's death ten years later.
• Carpe Fulgur, the company responsible for the localization of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, was founded by two guys trying to get into the localization business only to be constantly turned down due to lack of experience. So they decided to create their own company to earn that experience.
• The United Services Automobile Association started as an insurance co-op formed by a group of American Army officers who couldn't get car insurance. Over the decades it has gradually expanded to become a rather successful financial institution offering insurance, banking, and various other services to American military personnel and their families.
• When The WB and UPN decided to merge and become The CW, the new network did not include any of the UPN affiliates owned by Fox (including many of the big-market stations). In response, Fox created a new network for these stations, MyNetworkTV.
• A (possibly apocryphal) story has it that the founder of Netflix did so after his outrage over a $40 Blockbuster late fee inspired him to start his own video rental service. With blackjack! And hookers!
• A Real Life example of a fed up customer starting their own - Fed up with ISPs, a Michigan man started his own fiber broadband service.
• This was essentially what led to the creation of the Dassault Rafale - France was originally collaborating with the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain on the Eurofighter project, but they wanted to make a carrier-capable version; when it became clear that none of the other countries wanted to bother with one, France withdrew to pursue their own project. Similar to many other examples of this trope, the Rafale actually entered service before the Eurofighter.
• The ice cream chain KaleidoScoops was started in 1999 by a bunch of Baskin-Robbins owners who had their franchises terminated due to underperformance.
• During the 1920's, Piggly Wiggly faced a decrease in business in Florida, which forced the chain's owner to sell his stores. A businessman in Atlanta purchased them, but chose not to visit the stores. One of the chain's managers, George W. Jenkins, decided to visit the new owner personally so that they could discuss the future of the business. But when Jenkins got to Atlanta, he was told the new owner was unavailable to talk due to a "critical business consultation". Jenkins overheard the new owner discussing his golf game over the phone, which only enraged him. Jenkins returned to Florida and started his own business, Publix Supermarkets, in order to compete against the new owner of Piggly Wiggly.
• In 2018, the founder of Nuclear Blast Records, Markus Staiger departed from the label following the label's acquisition by Believe Digital. The split resulted in Staiger founding the label Atomic Fire Records in 2021 while transfering roughly a dozen bands from his former label over to the new label. Additional bands have since been signed such as U.D.O., Power Paladin, Skull Fist and Mystic Circle.
• The Colorado-based pizza delivery chain Blackjack Pizza was started by Vince Schmuhl, a former Domino's employee, in 1983 after Schmuhl decided to open his own chain to provide an alternative to Domino's; which had been the only major delivery chain in the Rocky Mountain region.
• The Christian record label Reunion Records was created by Michael Blanton and Dan Harrell mainly to serve as a home for Kathy Troccoli, a singer they managed, after numerous labels turned her down. Troccoli and future stars Michael W. Smith and Rich Mullins served as the label's first three artists.
• In 1979, Holiday Inn franchise mogul Robert L. Brock signed an agreement with Nolan Bushnell's Pizza Time Theatre Inc. to open as many as 280 Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre locations across 16 states. However, Brock noticed that other companies were making animatronics that were more advanced than PTT's Cyberamics (even though Bushnell had reassured Brock at the signing of the franchising agreement that the company's technology would continue to evolve), in particular he took interest in the animatronics of the Orlando, Florida-based Creative Engineering, Inc., which manufactured the Wolf Pack 5 and Hard Luck Bears shows, so just before the opening of his first location, Brock voided the agreement with Pizza Time and formed a partnership with Creative Engineering to create his own chain, Showbiz Pizza Place, with the first Showbiz location in Kansas City, Missouri featuring the Wolf Pack 5 and all further locations using a new animatronic show, The Rock-afire Explosion, which featured revamped versions of Wolf Pack 5 and Hard Luck Bears characters.

Clubs

Clubs

• A couple of the early 20th-century industrialists started their own golf clubs, university endowments, etc., because they kept getting shunned by old money families.
  • In the same way, New York City's grandest palazzo, the Metropolitan Club, was organized by J. P. Morgan in protest against not being admitted to some of the city's other exclusive private men's clubs. He showed them.

Education

Education

• This is how Cambridge University was formed. A bunch of students were kicked out of Oxford, made their way across the country, and started their own university.
  • This is also how University College London, the third university to be founded in England after Oxford and Cambridge, came into being. Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, it was entirely secular and allowed women in on an equal footing with men, inspired by the (then) radical philosophies of Jeremy Bentham.
  • The University of Bristol was genuinely founded by a man whose son failed to get into Oxford. The original 'college' is now the Physics Department.
• Several current universities in Shanghai, or their predecessors, were founded that way during the first half of the 20th century:
  • In 1902, some students left the Nanyang Academy (predecessor of Shanghai and Xi'an Jiaotong Universities) over what they perceived as unfair treatment of one disciplinary action, and their sympathizers arranged them to study European philosophy from Rev. Ma Xiangbo, a Chinese Jesuit monk. These students became the first students of Aurora University, a Jesuit university founded the following year under Rev. Ma's behest. However, in 1904, Rev. Ma Resigned In Protest with a group of students as the Jesuits wanted to dissolve the student government—and went on to found Fudan University.
  • The two major predecessors of East China Normal University were also founded this way:
    • In 1924, the president of Xiamen University mentioned respect for Confucianism in a public speech, which did not sit up well with the college's radical elements, who left for Shanghai to found Great China University.
    • St. John's University was an Episcopal college known for being very good, very expensive, and very politically conservative, and predictively was not pleased with its pro-labor elements during a major labour movement in 1925. As a result, 19 members of the faculty and more than 500 students left to found Kwang Hwa University. Ironically, the main bulk of St. John's was forcibly merged into ECNU, which formed from a less-than-voluntary merger between Great China and Kwang Hwa.

Politics

Politics

• Finland. The duchy of Finland had been a part of the Swedish kingdom until 1809, when Russia conquered and annexed her after a war. When The Russian Revolution started and the Czar abdicated, a power vacuum was created in Finland. The bourgeoisie and the intelligentsiya wanted to stay with Russia; the nobility wanted to re-join Sweden. In the end, Finland eventually declared herself an independent state 6th December 1917.
• This is notoriously commonplace with left-wing and socialist groups, who always seem to have trouble sticking together when disagreements arise. To wit: The Party for Socialism and Liberation, a major Marxist-Leninist organization in the United States, was split off from the Worker's World Party, and the Worker's World Party split off from the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Workers Party split off from the Communist Party USA, the Communist Party USA split off from the Socialist Party of America, and the Socialist Party of America split off from the Socialist Labor Party of America!
• In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in the United States presidential election as one of four candidates running under the banner of the Democratic-Republican Party, but the Electoral College was split. The party elite in Congress ended up awarding the presidency to Jackson's rival, John Quincy Adams. In response, Jackson founded his own party, the modern Democratic party, and ran against Adams four years later, winning in a landslide.
  • And in response to that, other elements of the disintegrating Democratic-Republican Party formed the Whig Party in 1833 to oppose Jackson. 15 years later, the Whigs were split over the issue of slavery which caused some of the anti-slavery Whigs to start their own Free Soil Party. Then in 1854, with both of those parties failing, former Free Soilers and northern Whigs got together to have another go at starting their own party: the modern Republican Party.
  • The Democratic party also split over the issue of slavery, resulting in the 1860 election (won by Abraham Lincoln) featuring four major presidential candidates, including two Democratic candidates and a "Constitutional Union" candidate. Unlike the Republican party, the Democratic party sort of healed their rift after the Civil War, only to split 80 years later over the issue of Civil Rights. However, the Dixiecrats - the Southern Democrats - rather than forming their own party, instead gradually took over the Republican party.
• This trope is credited as one of the reasons that Libertarianism (in the American sense) has so much trouble becoming a party with any real power. There are simply too many different groups that consider themselves Libertarian to ever organize.
• Theodore Roosevelt disliked William Howard Taft and the growing conservatism of the formerly moderate Republican party (and felt personally betrayed by his former protege Taft's role in that rightward shift), so after a failed attempt to unseat Taft as the Republican nominee (few states held primaries in that era, so party bosses had almost complete control over the nominating process and they were firmly in Taft's corner) he started his own progressive liberal party in 1912, known informally as the Bull Moose Party. As with all United States third parties, it failed and instead split the vote so the Democrat won.
  • That was Roosevelt's intention. He hated Taft's policies and would have rather seen a Democrat win than Taft get re-elected. So he created the new party to sabotage Taft. And in the process he left Taft with the ignominy of being the only incumbent US president to finish third place in his reelection bid.
  • Despite the failure of the Bull Moose movement, most of its adherents threw in their lot with the Democrats after Franklin Roosevelt - 5th cousin of Theodore - announced the New Deal policy platform in the 1930s.
• The 13 British colonies in North America had a bit of a problem with the mother country's bad habit of forcing legislation (and taxation) on them without their permission (since it would be too much of a hassle to ship American politicians across the Atlantic to Parliament), so they decided to start their own independent government, with an eye towards fixing all the grievances they had with Britain. Britain of course took exception to that, the Americans took exception to their exception, the Americans won, and history was made.
  • And of course the American Civil War was a failed attempt by the rebellious southern states to form a new country due to fears that the country would restrict or ban Slavery (and a bunch of other, minor political and social tensions as well). The same conflict led to the creation of the state of West Virginia, when it turned out that those Virginians living in the Appalachians wanted nothing to do with the whole 'slavery' or 'secession' stuff and decided to secede from Virginia and rejoin the glorious 'murrikan motherland.
• Even Al Qaeda is not immune to this, with Moktar Belmoktar, a former disgruntled employee starting his own terrorist group after Al Qaeda wrote him a scathing letter accusing him of, among other things, failing to carry out a single operation, not filling out expense reports, not attending meetings and not answering his phone when they called.
• Political parties, especially those positioned far from the center, usually start out this way with some radical from a more "grounded" party feels their party sold out and breaks off from it. For example, every left wing organization or party in Sweden, be they democratic socialists, syndicalist or outright Stalinist descends from the left-to-center-left Social Democratic party in one way or the other.
  • Similarly, high profile members of far-right parties in the UK have a habit of suddenly deciding that the party is too moderate for their tastes and splitting off to form parties more in keeping with their personal ideals. Prominent examples include former British National Party members Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, who split away to form Britain First, and would-be UKIP leader Annie-Marie Waters, who suffered a surprise defeat in the 2017 UKIP leadership election, and subsequently stormed out of the party and formed For Britain.
  • A recent example from Canada: In September 2018, Conservative leadership runner-up Maxime Bernier, disgruntled with actual new party leader Andrew Scheer not being hard enough on immigration for his tastes, quit the Tories and founded the People's Party of Canada, a party with much the same views as the Conservatives but with a more libertarian, populist and, of course, anti-immigrant stance.
• In the Philippines, the Liberal Party got its start in the 1940s as a splinter-off faction of the Nacionalista Party (virtually the only party in power at the time, as the country/semi-US-colony was essentially a one-party state). Disgruntled party members, chief among them Manuel Roxas (who would go on to be President in 1946), left and started their own party to challenge the Nacionalistas at the polls. Not that it really mattered party-wise, because the two parties differed very little in ideological leaning, and party-switching or "turncoatism" was rife—a reality that still holds today under an ostensibly multiparty government. The Liberals in fact were the originators of the "start-your-own-party" trend regardless of ideology or beliefs.
• Benito Mussolini was originally a leader in the Italian Socialist movement, but soured on the group as they took an anti-war stance during World War One (Mussolini thought that a war would accelerate the socialist movement and allow for the overthrow of the old order). After getting kicked out of the Socialists, Mussolini formed the Fascists to cater to soldiers and strongmen who felt Italy had been cheated out of its reward for assisting the other members of the Entente, and they would go on to dominate Italian politics until World War II.
• A particularly stark example occurred in Australian politics in the 2010s, as there was an influx of politicians founding political parties named after themselves. Eccentric billionaire Clive Palmer founded the Palmer United Party in 2013 and was elected to the House of Representatives, while three Palmer United candidates were also elected to the Senate. Palmer United soon disintegrated in spectacular fashion, and two of its former senators ran for re-election in 2016 under new parties named after themselves: the Jacqui Lambie Network and the Glenn Lazarus Team. While both Palmer and Lazarus were voted out, Lambie has been consistently re-elected to the Senate ever since.

Production Companies

Production Companies

• Disney as it exists today came about from Walt Disney losing his contract with Universal in 1928. The studio later founded its own distribution company Buena Vista in 1953 after disagreements with its previous distributor RKO Radio Pictures.
  • Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were two Disney animators who stayed with Universal after Walt Disney left in 1928, and they in turn left Universal in 1929 to form their own studio. For this, they teamed up with producer Leon Schlesinger, who got them a contract with Warner Bros. to distribute their new Looney Tunes series. Then in 1933, they left that studio over a budget dispute and went to work for Van Beuren Studios to create the Cubby Bear cartoon shorts before a dispute arose again. In 1934, they signed a deal with MGM. While there was a brief period where they were fired after one Happy Harmonies cartoon went far over budget, they came back to MGM and created some of their best-known work until they voluntarily left in the early-1940s, doing some miscellaneous work until retiring in 1960.
  • Charles Mintz, Disney's one-time distributor and the man most responsible for causing Walt to leave Universal in 1928, was himself dropped by Universal in 1929. His response was to fully take over his wife Margaret Winkler's company the Winkler Studio (which he had been de facto running since 1924), renaming it the Mintz Studio and signing a deal with Columbia Pictures to distribute cartoons. Mintz eventually became indebted to Columbia and lost his studio to them in 1939, passing away one year later.
  • Ub Iwerks left Disney in 1930 to create a new studio with Disney's former distributor Pat Powers. Although he pioneered many new animation techniques in his shorts, Iwerks' studio was never profitable and he was dropped by Powers in 1936. After his studio went bankrupt a year later Iwerks retired from animation altogether, opting instead to rejoin Disney in 1940 as the head of their newly-formed research and special effects department.
  • Multiple Disney artists who found themselves out of work for taking part in the Disney strike created UPA in 1948, which pioneered the Limited Animation technique that was prevalent during The Dark Age of Animation.
    • Multiple animation studios came to be from former UPA staff, including Format Films (best known for the first animated incarnation of Alvin and the Chipmunks), Bill Melendez Productions (the Peanuts specials), Pantomime Pictures (Roger Ramjet), and Murakami-Wolf-Swenson (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). A book about UPA, When Magoo Flew, suggests that the reason so many studios came to be was because many UPA personnell, disgruntled by Stephen Bosustow's mismanagement, felt they could run a studio better than he can.
  • Don Bluth was a Disney animator who was unhappy with the mediocre animated films that the studio was churning out after the death of Walt Disney. He and twelve other animators left Disney in 1979 to form their own animation studio, with the intention of replacing Disney or at the very least providing Disney with some genuine competition to force them to make better movies. The studio ended up succeeding on both fronts: it replaced Disney as the premier American animation studio in the 1980s and it forced Disney to step up their game... but as consequence Disney regained its powerhouse status in the 1990s and Bluth couldn't keep up, leading to the closure of his original studio and then later his second studio.
  • After being fired from Disney in 1983 by then-studio head Ron Miller, John Lasseter was tapped by Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs to create CGI advertisements for their new line of computers. Lasseter's ad department turned into a short film department after buyers became interested in seeing how extensively the software could be used, and these shorts caught the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg (who had replaced Miller as Disney's studio head in the mid-1980s). He signed the studio (renamed Pixar) to create a series of computer animated films in the early 1990s, and the rest is history.
  • Richard Rich left Disney to form Rich Animation Studios in 1985 after disagreements with Disney Animation head Peter Schneider over the direction of his next film. Unlike Don Bluth his studio is still around today, but it was never anywhere near as successful as Bluth's was.
  • Disney purchased Miramax Films in 1993, in an effort to establish itself in the independent film market. After a rocky decade of relationships with Miramax's heads Bob and Harvey Weinstein (that culminated in Disney refusing to release Miramax's Fahrenheit 9/11 and suspecting that the Weinstein brothers weren't being entirely honest about their studio's profitability in the 2000s), the brothers left Disney to form The Weinstein Company in 2005. Disney shuttered and sold Miramax in 2010, while The Weinstein Company was thrown into bankruptcy in 2017 following the firing and arrest of Harvey over sexual abuse allegations that spanned decades.
  • Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney in 1994 after arguments with then-CEO Michael Eisner, and went on to co-found DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. The best-known, most successful part of the company turned out to be Katzenberg's DreamWorks Animation. Spielberg's live-action portion, DreamWorks Studios, had some success in the late 1990s/early 2000s but is much less active today.
  • Joe Roth replaced Katzenberg as the Disney Studios chairman and remained in that position until 2000, when he left to form his own production company Revolution Studios. He then left that company in 2007 to form a new one, Roth Films.
• Orion Pictures was created by former United Artists executives who were fed up with its then-owner Transamerica's influence on the company.
• After MGM shut down its animation division in 1957, animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbara formed their own animation studio, appropriately titled Hanna-Barbera.
  • In 1996, when Time Warner and Turner merged (the latter of which owned Hanna-Barbera at the time), then-president Fred Seibert quit and formed his own animation studio, Frederator Studios.
• Similar to above, after Warner Bros. closed down their animation division Friz Freleng teamed up with David H. DePatie (who was managing the division at the time) to form DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.
  • When Chuck Jones was fired by Warners just shortly before their animation division closed down, he was hired at the newly reopened MGM animation division. After MGM closed it down again he formed his own company, Chuck Jones Enterprises.
• Netflix's popularity has encouraged major studios like Disney and Warner Bros to start their own streaming services rather than license their content to Netflix or other services like Hulu or Amazon Prime.
• In the mid-70s, George Lucas wanted to do a feature-film version of Flash Gordon, so he set out to acquire its rights. But when he was outbid by Dino DeLaurentiis, he decided to create his own space opera, Star Wars.
  • This is a double example. After deciding to create his own movie, Lucas had a very grand image for the special effects (poor effects being one of the things keeping sci-fi mostly confined to B-movies). When he couldn't find anyone who made the grade, he got together some college buddies and revolutionized special effects with his own company. They're still around today- you probably know them as Industrial Light & Magic.
• This is effectively the story behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe: after dealing with flops made by other studios with their characters and only getting a small percentage of the profits the ones that were hits made, Marvel decided to make Iron Man on their own, and the rest is history. Possibly a subversion since Marvel was later bought by Disney (see above for the numerous studios founded by ex-Disney employees), but Disney has let the MCU function fairly independently.
• Masi Oka decided he wanted to break into the game industry, since he enjoyed playing games and wanted to make some, but the studios he approached with his ideas turned him down. So, he asked a bunch of college kids about to graduate if they wanted to come work for him, and that's how Mobius Digital got started.
• When the cult online game City of Heroes was shut down for some reason and NC Soft seemed unwilling to sell it, fans immediately considered developing a replacement, which became City of Titans. Less than three months later, even before the original game's shutdown had been completed, founding member Golden Girl started another project, Heroes and Villains, over Creative Differences. City of Titans will be a Spiritual Sequel (as in, revamping the game mechanics to some extent), while Heroes and Villains is apparently supposed to be City of Heroes with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.
• This is how the telephone industry got started. When Alexander Graham Bell's initial design was rejected by Western Union, then the leading distributor of telegraph services, he took the design to Joseph Henry, who saw its potential. Western Union tried to cram their patent into the office before Bell did, but eventually gave up, believing the telephone to be a minor threat to their telegraph monopoly that would fizzle out soon. They ended up shooting themselves in the foot with this decision, as in only 3 years, there were 30,000 sets worldwide, and 2 million sets by 1900. Thus, Western Union ended up being the one to fizzle out (save for use as a money-wiring system) and Bell's telephone company is still around to this day. You might have heard of them: a little company named AT&T.
• This is how Image Comics came into being. Several artists who worked on most of Marvel Comics's top-selling properties in the late 80's to early 90's, such as Todd Mc Farlane, Rob Liefeld, and Marc Silvestri, were dissatisfied with how poorly they were treated, in particular not owning any of the properties they created while working under Marvel. In 1992, they all left Marvel to form their own company: Image Comics. Image itself would not own anything other than its name and logo, and published the comics while the creators retained ownership, an arrangement completely unheard of at the time. Image single-handedly revolutionized the comics industry, with Youngblood (Image Comics)'s first issue being the all-time best selling independent comic at the time of its release. At the height of its success, Image actually beat out D.C. in sales, forcing them to take drastic measures like killing off Superman (albeit temporarily) and crippling Batman in order to keep up with them.
• Quite a few Japanese animation studios were founded by well-respected producers, animators and directors:
  • Several studios were founded by ex-Tatsunoko crew:
    • Studio Pierrot was founded by a group of former Tatsunoko employees in 1979.
    • Ex-Tatsunoko Production and Kitty Film producer Tomoyuki Miyata founded J.C. Staff in 1986 after serving in Kitty Film's Mitaka Studio.
    • Mitsuhisa Ishikawa left Tatsunoko after the production of Red Photon Zillion to form Production I.G in 1987 along with Takayuki Goto, retaining the staff that produced the series.
    • Kenji Horikawa left Production I.G in 2000 for his native Toyama to follow a promise he made to his family. He would later go on to form his own animation studio, P. A. Works, as there were no animation studios nearby at the time.
    • Anime producer Nagateru Kato left Tatsunoko Pro to serve as a producer for MOVIC before going on to form TNK.
    • Koichi Mashimo began at Tatsunoko Productions in the 70s and went freelance by the late 80s. He eventually went on to establish his own studio, Bee Train Production in 1997.
  • Yutaka Fujioka formed TMS Entertainment after his previous company Tokyo Ningyo Cinema failed.
  • Ex-TMS and Toei animators Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata teamed up to co-found Studio Ghibli.
  • GONZO was formed by Showji Murahama, Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Shinji Higuchi and Mahiro Maeda after they left Studio Gainax in 1992. When GONZO went bankrupt in the early 2010s, Tomonori Shibata formed Studio Gokumi, taking the staff of Studio No. 5 with him.
  • Shortly after Osamu Nagai left GONZO in February 2009, he took his staff of animators with him to found Hoods Entertainment.
  • After Masahiko Minami left Sunrise as an animation producer, he would later go on to form Studio Bones.
  • Mikihiro Iwata, also a producer for Sunrise, would later go on to found A-1 Pictures in 2005.
  • Former Mushi Productions animators Masao Maruyama, Osamu Dezaki, Rintaro and Yoshiaki Kawajiri formed Madhouse in October 1972. When Maruyama retired from Madhouse in 2011 at the age of 70, he went on to found MAPPA.
  • After Jiyū Ōgi and Yoshiyuki Matsuzaki left AIC, they would later go on to found Production IMS in 2013. Unfortunately, Production IMS shut down in 2018 due to bankruptcy.
  • Gaku Iwasa formed White Fox in 2007 after leaving OLM Incorporated.
  • Hayato Kaneko served as an animation producer for the animation studio Frontline. He would later go on to found his own company, SILVER LINK., in 2007 after leaving Frontline.
  • Studio Chizu was established by producer Yūichirō Saitō and director Mamoru Hosoda after leaving Madhouse in 2011.
  • When Studio Ghibli temporarily halted production of their works following Hayao Miyazaki's temporary retirement, producer Yoshiaki Nishimura left the studio and formed Studio Ponoc to produce Mary and The Witch's Flower.
  • Producer Yoko Hatta was a cel painter with Mushi Production. After marrying her husband, Hideaki in the late 70s the pair founded Kyoto Animation.
  • Knack Productions was formed by ex-Mushi and Toei staff, including Seiichi Hayashi, Sadao Tsukioka, Sakuro Koyanagi, and Seiichi Nishino. In spite of the talent involved, Knack Productions became infamous for its rather poor quality production, most notably Chargeman Ken!.
• In approximately 2001, the editorial board of Enix's Shonen GanGan brand decided to move back to a more "orthodox" Shōnen direction, and shifted a large number of Multiple Demographic Appeal works—or even outright Shōjo series—to newer magazines such as Monthly Stencil or Monthly GFantasy. This caused a rather large uprising from its editorial staff as well as affected mangaka; Ichijinsha (as well as the smaller Mag Garden) are formed by some of the disgruntled editors, who brought with them more than a few of their artists. This is why Ichijinsha, publisher of Comic ZERO-SUM and Yuri Hime, is more known for its female-oriented works.

Religion

Religion

• Quite a few Christian sects got started because of this trope:
  • The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, who formed their own sect of Christianity because its founder, George Fox, objected to the Anglicans' emphasis on ceremony.
  • Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. So he started his own church! With beer! And wives for the clergy! And no corruption!
  • Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. When the Pope refused to annul Henry's current marriage, Henry formed his own church, the Church of England, installed himself as its head, and divorced her anyway.^note Also, Catherine had been his brother's widow, meaning by the convention of the time his father had needed a special papal ruling to allow him to marry her at all, making his annulment request a bit hypocritical.
  • The Baptist church in the United States in the 1800s favored abolition of slavery. The Southern Baptist church splits off in 1845 as an explicitly pro-slavery sect.
  • The Free Methodist Church's name comes from their abolitionist roots. That, and their refusal to charge for seats.
  • Christian humorist Adrian Plass, in one of his novels, mentions the concept of church groups splitting so often that some people are in danger of dissenting themselves right back to where they started...
  • Mormon Fundamentalists are what happens when, thinking mainstream Mormons were wrong to abandon polygamy, more radicalized Mormons start their own. This came about, mind you, after Joseph Smith did the same thing to Christianity. (Although Mormons would disagree with labeling their church as reformed.)
  • The Episcopal Church in the US went through this following the election of a gay divorced man as bishop of New Hampshire. This caused many conservative Episcopal parishes to separate themselves into the Anglican Church in North America. For the time being the Episcopal Church retains membership in the international Anglican Communion (though relations are strained) and the ACNA has not been granted full communion (although some churches within the Anglican Communion are in full communion with ACNA instead of the Episcopal Church).
  • The Metropolitan Community Church in the US was founded by ex-Baptist/Pentecostal preacher Troy Perry in protest against the Christian attitudes toward homosexuality at the time.
  • The Raskol was in protest of changes of the liturgy by the Patriarch Nikon.
  • The Church of the East was created after the 431 Ephese Second Council.
  • And, of course, the Older Than Print Trope Maker of religious schisms, the Great Schism, whereupon the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches went their separate ways.
  • Christianity itself is this trope embodied. It all started when the Rabbinic Judaism declared the Messianic sects as heretic in the synod of Yamnia 90 AD. The Messianic sects of Judaism then unified and became Christianity, which was organized under the successors of St. Peter as Catholic Church.

Sports

Sports

• Adidas and Puma, two rival sport shoe companies, began as one company founded by brothers Adolf "Adi" Dassler and Rudolf Dassler. After the two had a violent fall out in 1948, the original company folded, with Adi founding Adidas and Rudi founding Puma. Their home town of Herzogenaurach became fiercely divided between the two brands, even the two football clubs; one was sponsored by Adidas, the other by Puma. The hatchet was finally buried in the late 2000's with a Peace One Day-sponsored soccer match, however Adidas and Puma remain independent concerns. Meanwhile, the brothers remained bitter rivals to their deaths (events like the original shoemakers going with Adi and the original management going with Rudi and each brother trying to denounce the other as a Nazi to the Americans after WWII certainly didn't help), and while they're now buried at the same graveyard, their graves are as far away from each other as possible.
• Garry Kasparov split from FIDE, the World Chess Federation, to form the PCA (Professional Chess Association) in 1993.
• This happens a lot in martial arts, especially after a particular organisation's founder has died. Often, a successor is chosen and many of their other protégés may disagree with this. There can often be other reasons as well, such as differences in what way the martial art chooses to (or not to) evolve or even what membership dues are required.
• Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was this to Judo, although initially unintentionally — Hélio and Carlos Gracie both learned a martial art their Japanese-immigrant teachers simply called "Jiu-Jitsu" and affirmed they didn't heard the term "Judo" until the 1950s and thought they were doing the same "Jiu-Jitsu" that was done in Japan — however, they decided to "split" and not adopt the Kodokan rules when they were introduced in Brazil, and in 1967 they (along with other 4 schools of Alvaro Barreto, Joao Alberto Barreto, Hélcio Leal Binda, and Oswaldo Fadda) founded the Jiu-Jitsu Federation of Guanabara with their own ruleset. The term "Jiu-Jitsu" served to differentiate it from Judo.
• Examples in Bodybuilding:
  • The World Bodybuilding Federation was created in 1990 by then-WWE (then the World Wrestling Federation) owner Vince McMahon with help from veteran bodybuilder Tom Platz, with the intention of challenging the dominance of the IFBB while also mixing in elements of pro wrestling, such as competitors being given ring names and kayfabe personas that were showcased in entertainment-based segments of WBF's media. Despite hiring away a number of IFBB competitors, the WBF ended up folding after only a short period of time due to varying reasons, with many WBF members allowed to re-join the IFBB after paying a fine.
  • The IFBB Elite Pro league split from the IFBB Pro league in 2017. Many reasons had been cited for the split, including alleged personal rivalry between IFBB President Rafael Santonja and NPC President Jim Manion. Contestants have to choose either league to compete in, not both. The traditional Olympia competitions remained linked to the Pro league.
• Bill Powell, after being banned from local golf courses due to racial segregation, designed and built the first integrated golf course in 1948.
• Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison Jr. wanted to buy the then-flagging Washington Redskins^note later renamed the Commanders in 2022 in 1958, but he backed out of the deal after Redskins owner George Preston Marshall changed the terms that were unfavorable to him. As a result, Murchison formed the Dallas Cowboys in 1960, and the most-well known rivalry in NFL history was born. What's more, Murchison purchased the rights to the Redskins' fight song, "Hail to the Redskins". Murchison gave the song back to Marshall, in exchange for Marshall's vote that would allow the Cowboys to be formed (at the time, a unanimous vote among NFL owners was required for a new team to be formed, and Marshall was the lone holdout, due to him wanting to maintain the Redskins' fanbase in the Southern US).
• This is the state of boxing with four "main" sanctioning bodies (five if you count the IBO): the WBO, IBF, WBC, and the WBA. This means that at any time there are (usually) four champions in any given weight class. Becoming "the" champ is damn near impossible because of a set of convoluted rules that pretty much disqualifies boxers from holding all the belts at the same time. This, compounded with all of them being notoriously corrupt and numerous other organizations springing up almost daily, effectively make belts worthless.^note Only two boxers in the 2010s, Terence Crawford and Oleksandr Usyk, successfully unified all four belts. Crawford did it in the light-welterweight class in 2017, and Usyk in the cruiserweight class the following year. Less than two weeks after Crawford unified the light-welterweight belts, he gave up his IBF belt because he didn't plan to fight before that group's deadline to fight its top contender, and not long after that gave up his other belts and moved to the more lucrative welterweight class. Usyk gave up his cruiserweight belts in 2019 to move to the even more lucrative heavyweight class.
• In March 1995, Tony George, head of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (home of the Indy 500), announced the formation of the Indy Racing League (IRL; now known as INDYCAR), ostensibly to make open-wheel racing in America less Euro-centric and give more direct control of the sport to track owners. Oh, and the majority of the drivers at the Indianapolis 500 (25 out of 33) would now have to be from the IRL. The existing sanctioning body, CART, responded with a blanket boycott of all IRL races and scheduling the new US 500 to run at the same time as Indy. The split remained for thirteen years before the sport was reunified under the banner of IRL and its IndyCar Series. This backfired horribly as the already dwindling fanbase was split into three groups: the people that watched the IRL (because they had Indy and the better TV deal), the people that stuck with CART (because they had the bigger stars), and the people that said "Screw both you guys, I'll just watch NASCAR instead." INDYCAR never really recovered from the split and at this point has been eclipsed by the euro-centric Formula One in America, and INDYCAR races regularly get crushed by the third tier NASCAR Truck Series races in the ratings.
• The American Basketball Association formed in 1967 to compete against the NBA, but was actually a long-term plan to merge its teams with the NBA, which happened (for some of them) in 1976.
• The founder and first president of the ABA went on to form the World Hockey Association in 1972, and was the most successful challenge to the NHL's dominance in North American hockey and helped bring down the NHL's reserve clause. The WHA administration refused to incorporate the reserve clause (which allowed a club to extend a player's contract by a year when it expired and do so indefinitely, effectively binding a player to one club for his entire career) and set a then-landmark $2.7 million salary for Bobby Hull. Though the league didn't survive past the end of the Seventies, four of its teams merged with the NHL.
• The National Hockey League was the result of a long-running dispute in the predecessor National Hockey Association between Eddie Livingstone, principal owner of the Toronto Shamrocks and Toronto Blueshirts, and the other owners of the league (Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Senators, and Quebec Bulldogs). The other owners realized the NHA's constitution meant they couldn't expel Livingstone, but they could vote to suspend the NHA (they could vote to suspend the NHA officially because too many of their players were overseas fighting in World War I) and then form the National Hockey League where those owners could keep Livingstone out. Which is what they did in 1917.
• The NFL has been challenged by several rival leagues, among them the American Football League, the United States Football League, both versions of Vince McMahon's XFL, and the Alliance of American Football. Of these challengers, the AFL was successful enough that it eventually merged with the NFL without losing any teams, and led to the creation of the biggest event for the sport, the Super Bowl. The others... not so much (the USFL was successful enough in a few areas that the NFL later added expansion teams in those places (the USFL name was later revived in 2022 for a minor league football organization co-owned by Fox Sports), but the first XFL was highly gimmick-driven and taken seriously by approximately nobody; the Alliance of American Football, while having tons of potential, crashed and burned due to legal issues; and the second XFL would have been an effective COVID-19 casualty if it weren't for a group led by Dwayne Johnson buying the league out of bankruptcy).
• The genesis of the American Football League in particular went through this: In 1959, the National Football League had only twelve teams, had no interest in expansion and only one team - the then-Chicago Cardinals - was considered to be on the market. Texas oilman Lamar Hunt had a meeting with Cardinals general manager Walter Wolfner (husband of team owner Violet Bidwill) who basically blew Hunt off. Wolfner bragged that they had suitors from all over the country, mentioning groups from Denver, Houston and Minneapolis, so he really didn't need to deal with Hunt. As Hunt flew back to Dallas, he realized that if there were really that many parties trying to get into pro football, there was no reason they couldn't just start a new league. The eight-team AFL debuted a year later, and quickly became a league to rival the NFL. The documentary Full Color Football has the story in greater detail.
• Australian television magnate Kerry Packer attempted to buy Cricket broadcasting rights from the Australian Cricket Board in the 1970s, but they refused, so Packer formed World Series Cricket, signing many of the players from Australia, England and the West Indies.
• Similar to the Dallas Cowboys example, and also crossing over with Create Your Own Villain, when the Cleveland Browns fired Coach Paul Brown, who the team is named after, he joined the new AFL and formed the cross-state Cincinnati Bengals, who not only are the Browns' second biggest rival behind the Pittsburgh Steelers, but also will never let Cleveland forget this by playing their home games at Paul Brown Stadium. It should be noted that, at the time of the Bengals' inception, Brown knew the AFL/NFL merger was a done deal and that the ensuing league realignment meant his new team would likely be placed in the same division as Cleveland.
• British Footy Teams:
  • When the English football team Wimbledon F.C. decided to relocate to Milton Keynes in 2002, a lot of Wimbledon fans were rather upset. In response, they formed their own club, AFC Wimbledon. In less than a decade, the new club had made it into the Football League, and in 2014, they beat the relocated "Milton Keynes Dons" in a cup match. Then AFCW joined MK Dons in League One (the third level) in 2016, and in 2018, there was much rejoicing throughout England as MK Dons were relegated to League Two, meaning that in 2018–19, AFCW would play at a higher level than MK Dons for the first time. Though that only lasted one season; MK returned to League One for 2019–20, and both remain at that level in 2020–21.
  • In 2005, a group of Manchester United fans unhappy about Malcolm Glazer's takeover founded their own club, FC United of Manchester. FC United are, as of 2015-16, in the sixth tier of the league.
  • A much older and more prominent example: when Everton were first founded, they played their home matches at Anfield. In 1892, after a dispute over rent, Everton left to go play at Goodison Park instead and Anfield's owner, John Houlding, decided to make his own team. He thus founded Liverpool F.C. with some of his old Everton friends, and one of English football's fiercest rivalries was born. Other teams in Europe, such as Italy's Inter Milan and Spain's Real Betis, were founded in a similar way.
• From 2009 to 2015, FIFA and France Football had jointly run the yearly Ballon d'Or awards (which had already exited since 1956 but were only run by the latter side), aimed to acknowledge the best soccer player in each year as well as other players in other categories. Some disagreements and conflicts between both institutions made the part separate ways in 2016, and since then France Football continued running the Ballon d'Or awards while FIFA created their own ceremony, called The Best.
• When The Olympic Games decided to drop baseball and softball in 2005, the International Baseball Federation (IBAF)^note since merged with softball's former governing body to create the current World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) along with pro leagues from all over the world (including America's Major League Baseball and Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball) started their own large-scale international tournament, the World Baseball Classic.
• Pat Riley spent five years as the head coach of the New York Knicks, building his team into a gritty, grind-it-out playoff powerhouse. Known for their physical play and rough fouls, they made it to the NBA Finals in 1994, where it took the full seven games before the Houston Rockets defeated them. That, along with several other heartbreaking losses, prompted Riley to step down as coach of the Knicks. Instead of retiring, however, he took the reins down at South Beach, where he became the head coach and team president of the Miami Heat. However, like the Paul Brown example above, Riley crossed it over with Create Your Own Villain; the Knicks became the biggest reason as to why he couldn't win a championship in the late 90s, eliminating the Heat three straight years after making the Conference Finals against the Bulls. Unlike the Knicks, however, Riley stuck around, and although it took a while, he finally did achieve what he couldn't with New York - a championship to Miami.
• A very common way for new NCAA conferences to form, with several schools breaking away from one conference to start another. Both the Southeastern (1933) and Atlantic Coast (1953) conferences were created by large breakaways from the Southern Conference^note The schools south and east of the Appalachian Mountains formed their own smaller conference and Clemson and Maryland left the conference in protest of unfair and harsh punishment for defying the conference's new post-season ban and five fellow regional conference members joined them, forming the original ACC(and became More Popular Spinoffs). The modern Pac-12 started after several schools were kicked out of the old Pacific Coast Conference (but eventually most of the remaining PCC members joined the new conference). Then there's this Recursive Reality situation: In 1938 several schools left the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference to start the Mountain States/Skyline Conference. In 1961, most of those schools joined with a few others to start the Western Athletic Conference. Then in 1999, eight WAC schools broke away to form the Mountain West Conference.
  • The current iteration of the Big East conference came about this way: Originally started in 1979 as a northeastern basketball-centric conference, the conference was slowly taken over by the football-playing schools. The non-football playing (and, co-incidentally all Catholic) schools ^note De Paul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall, St Johns, and Villanova (who does play football but on the FCS/1-AA level), along with league newcomers Butler, Creighton and Xavier (many of whom were original Big East members) tired of being treated as the conference little brothers, so broke away to form their own non-football conference, and took the Big East name and legacy with them (including conference records and the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament). The remaining football schools ^note including U Conn, the sole remaining founding member of the (now-former) Big East, and former conference mainstay Temple, who had just returned from the Atlantic 10 scrambled to reform, poaching the strongest schools from Conference USA ^note Central Florida, East Carolina, Houston, Memphis, Southern Methodist, Tulane and Tulsa(most of whom were trying to increase their football programs' profiles) along with the Naval Academy as a football-only member ^note They were independent for football and continue to play in the Patriot League for all other sports to form the American Athletic conference.
• Facing sponsor pullout, the J. League side Yokohama Flügels hastily arranged a merger with cross-town rival Yokohama Marinos in 1998 to form Yokohama F. Marinos. A significant portion of Flügels' fans, however, refused to change their allegiance to merged side and considered Flügels to have dissolved instead. What they did, then, was to fund a new club—Yokohama FC—to take over Flügels' place.

Technology

Technology

• An early example in the technology world was a group of engineers known as the "Traitorous Eight" who worked under William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor. Irritated by Shockley's increasingly erratic behavior and iron-fistedness, the Traitorous Eight quit and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, which in turn spawned Intel.
• This is also true for software, especially GNU and the Free Software Foundation. Half of the software listed on SourceForge would not exist without this trope, though it's usually spurred on by avoidance of restrictive licenses. Where religions have schisms, free/open-source software has "forks". Granted, this trope is at the heart of FOSS software: according to their philosophy, anyone who thinks they can do better should be given the opportunity to prove it.
  • In the BSD world, OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD owe their existence to the fact that their founders had disagreements related to the development of NetBSD and FreeBSD, respectively.
  • Allegedly, one of the main reasons Linux came about was because Linus Torvalds was becoming increasingly frustrated with several of the design decisions that went into the design of Minix, a payware educational Unix distribution for personal computers, that he was forced to use at college. He then managed to get into a heated argument with the creator of the distribution while he was airing his greviences on usenet. After his pride was badly torn up by the creator and his fanboys, Linus decided to start his own, and the rest is history.
  • Also, the main reason ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) was created was because the OSS (Open Sound System) team had announced that they were going to split their driver packages into two- a free package for the most common consumer cards and a paid-for package for the higher end prosumer and professional sound cards. The Linux developers, whose motto was to have Linux running on everything, were repulsed and thus started their own.
  • As a side note, a different issue with OSS' drivers, namely lack of security, was what gotten the OpenBSD developers to create their own OSS-like set of drivers.
  • When dying computing conglomerate and open-source champion Sun Microsystems got bought over by the database megacorp Oracle, Oracle proceeded to discontinue OpenSolaris several weeks later, barely hiding their greed and hinting that people who want to continue using Solaris will now be subjected to either a crippled free version called Solaris Express, or have to pay up for a full version, where previously OpenSolaris was completely feature-compatible with the paid Solaris system save for the lack of tech support. Thing is, the license for OpenSolaris allowed the last version produced before Oracle shut the gates to the source code to remain free. The biggest contributors took the last version of the OS and forked, and illumos was born. ^note This is also a case of Create Your Own Villain, as the team originally had no plans to fork until Oracle decided to give them the finger.
  • At the same time as it screwed the OpenSolaris community, Oracle's behavior stifled the development of OpenOffice. Many of their developers were laid off or left on their own accord, they went on to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice into LibreOffice. Oracle did eventually just give OpenOffice away to the Apache Foundation, but that only created a bitter Fandom Rivalry as a result.
  • And to show that things come in the power of three, Oracle buying up Sun also gave them control of the MySQL database engine, which they then proceed to cripple as to prevent the free option from competing fairly against their flagship product. Again, many devs left and forked the last Sun-produced version, this time into MariaDB.
  • Another high-profile fork in the open-source community was the FFMPEG/LibAV schism in the software project that underlies nearly all video-related open source applications. Emerging from political turmoil within the FFMPEG project, the effects of the split the sent shockwaves through the broader open-source community, particularly Linux users, due to Ubuntu (one of the most popular distributions) initially siding with Libav. ^note (see here for further commentary, though it's a bit old). More than half a decade later, the two projects are still developed separately, with Libav pointedly ignoring FFMPEG's existence and FFMPEG continuing to expend effort to merge Libav's improvements back into itself in addition to doing its own development. The turmoil surrounding the issue has ceased, however, since most of the projects that initially sided with Libav have since gone back to FFMPEG.
  • Another heated one with the GNOME desktop project. When it was revealed that GNOME 3 was going to take a page out of Windows 8's book by doing away with a start button metaphor for a start screen metaphor designed for both desktops and tablets, a subset of the developers were vocally (and understandably) opposed to this on the grounds, that Microsoft were regretting doing that: The intention was to design a user interface that was optimised for mouse-and-keyboard and touchscreen operation but the result an interface that was sub-optimal for either. This led to two forks- MATE, which forks GNOME 2 with the intention of keeping the immediate interface but keeping the underlying libraries upgraded to the latest, and Cinnamon, which takes GNOME 3 but deletes the undesirable features while porting desired features from GNOME 2 back into it. The developers of GNOME eventually gave in and created an official GNOME 2 mode for the desktop environment, called GNOME Flashback.
  • And this is happening again with the XFCE project, a third option taken by some who hated GNOME 3 but did not want to wait for MATE or Cinnamon to mature as it was started as an attempt to create a GNOME 2 clone that is light on resources. When the newly appointed head of development proved himself to be a prima-donna and wanted to change XFCE to clone GNOME 3 (specifically, the hated elements like the start screen and the location of the save/open button in the file chooser) and specifically started to vocally attack anyone who protested the idea, a group of developers have immediately schism themselves from the main project and forked the current version to XFCE Classic.
  • A unique case: The creators of LXDE, another GNOME 2 clone that focuses on being lightweight, decided to switch from the ageing and depreciated GTK2 widget toolkit to Qt instead of GTK3, and forked themselves into LXQt. Work was stopped on LXDE proper and the project was officially abandoned, and users were advised to switch over to the new project. Not everyone was okay with this, as Qt uses a lot more system resources; not enough to be a problem on the majority of modern hardware, but an issue for devteams who create ultra-lightweight Linux distros designed to keep exceptionally old and underpowered PCs usable. Some of those devs assumed control of the original project and recommenced development using the newer GTK3 library, and now LXDE and LXQt are two separate projects, with the latter becoming an officially recognized fork of the former.
• Microsoft created the C# programming language, which is similar to Java in many ways, after Sun Microsystems refused to allow them to create a customized version of Java to bundle with Windows, fearing that it would be subject to Microsoft's "extend, embrace, extinguish" strategy.
• The ReactOS project, an open-source Windows clone, began as a reaction to some of the more questionable business practices of Microsoft. It's also how it got its name.
• Seymour Cray was a star employee of Control Data Corporation during the mainframe computer era - until management turned down his proposal for a next-generation super-computer. Cray quit and formed his namesake super-computer company, which Control Data - at the time one of 'IBM and the Seven Dwarfs' - never fully recovered from.
• After Steve Jobs was Kicked Upstairs at Apple due to his stubborn personality rendering him unable to get along with anyone else in the company, he decided to quit and form a new computer company, called NeXT, which was basically every stereotype about Apple turned up a notch. Its products generated a lot of buzz for their ease-of-use, technical sophistication, and striking aesthetic designs, but they were also ludicrously expensive and not compatible with any existing products ^note Bill Gates famously quipped "NeXT has an interesting feature called incompatibility". This came at a time when the industry was rapidly embracing the standards set by the IBM Personal Computer, which also had the effect of driving costs down, leading to poor sales of NeXT's computers. Ironically, NeXT's legacy would be salvaged when Apple purchased them in 1997 in order to use their NeXTSTEP operating system as the basis for what became Mac OS X, bringing Jobs back to Apple in the process. Though at first he only held the position of "advisor", he quickly rose to the position of CEO, which he held until shortly before his death in 2011.
• Developer byuu created the bsnes and higan Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulators, which are designed to be 100% accurate to the original console^note Meaning they mimic the behavior of the system exactly, as opposed to other emulators which to varying degrees sacrifice accuracy in order to improve performance after the developers of ZSNES, a popular SNES emulator, refused to patch an inaccuracy in their emulator^note To put things from ZSNES' perspective, patching that inaccuracy would impact performance. ZSNES was hand-crafted in machine code to use very little resources and CPU power such that even Super FX and DSP-1 games can run at playable speed on a lowly Pentium 166 machine, and part of that includes several speed "hacks" that introduces inaccuracy in favor of speed. BSNES and it's accuracy-favoring engine on the other hand requires a very fast and modern multi-core machine to run.
• Brendan Eich started development of the privacy-focused Brave Internet browser after being fired from Mozilla when his donations to an anti-gay marriage group came to light.
• Huawei launched their own mobile services framework called Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) as a substitute for Google Play Services, as well as their own app store called AppGallery after Google stopped providing software support to Huawei due to US government sanctions; the AppGallery has existed prior to the company being sanctioned in 2019, though it was only available in China until 2018. For the remaining apps which couldn't be published to the AppGallery due to sanctions or some other reason, they even came up with workarounds such as directing users to download APK installation files from mirror sites such as APKPure, though compatibility may be hit-or-miss as some apps may require specific Google APIs to function correctly.
• Many forks of Firefox and its Gecko browser engine owe their existence to this trope as well, including SeaMonkey, created in 2005 by former Mozilla Application Suite users after the Mozilla Foundation decided to focus on the standalone projects Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Nearing the release of version 3 of the popular 3D modelling and animation tool Blender, the Blender Foundation decided that no one was using the game engine functionality of the software and voted to drop it (the functionality not being widely advertised or even known to exist was not helping). The few that did care, however, forked the code, and now the engine lives on as UPBGE.

Video Games

Video Games

• Super Mario Fusion Revival is an odd case. JudgeSpear long ago started a game he called Super Mario Fusion: Mushroom Kingdom Hearts, a fan game focused on Mario visiting other dimensions. The influence of other developers made it mutate into Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, a game that took Mega Crossover to the next level. At one point in development communication between JudgeSpear and other developers was strained, so the game mutated further in that direction without his consent. When he became active again, Mushroom Kingdom Fusion was so different from his original idea that he decided to leave it be and essentially used this trope on himself.
• While working at Atari, Jay Miner (having previously developed the 2600 console and 800 computer) designed what would become the Amiga. Frustrated that Atari wouldn't produce it, he left, starting his own company, Hi-Toro, to build it. Hi-Toro went bankrupt, but Commodore bought them and the Amiga design, eventually manufacturing it themselves. Atari would later come out with its Amiga equivalent, the ST, under new ownership.
• A handful of Atari programmers during the Ray Kassar era were disgruntled that not only were they not getting credit for the games they created, but such information was treated as top secret. So they formed Activision, the world's first third-party gaming company, which upon creation gave credit to the programmer who created the game right on the game box and in television commercials.
• Electronic Arts was also founded for similar reasons not too long afterward. Now look at what they've become, although in hindsight, Activision is no different.
• The development studio tri-Ace, known for the Star Ocean series, is named for the three employees who left Telenet Japan's Wolf Team studio to strike on their own. One of them was the main programmer of Tales of Phantasia, who was frustrated with the Executive Meddling from Namco that occurred with the game's development.
• A sad case is when most of the old-school developers of Blizzard Entertainment (the people responsible for Warcraft one and two, Diablo and StarCraft) left to form their own game studio, made the Diablo-clone Hellgate: London, and bankrupted.
• Telltale Games is another example, founded by ex-LucasArts employees Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander after LucasArts all but abandoned the Adventure Game genre.
• Like the Telltale Games example above, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert also left LucasArts at around the same time to form Double Fine.
• Petroglyph Studios was formed by former Westwood Studio employees after EA shut down Westwood.
• Raw Thrills was formed in 2001 by Eugene Jarvis after Midway Games shut down their arcade division the year prior.
• The Sony PlayStation began life as a CD add-on for Nintendo's Super NES console. However, when Nintendo backed out of their contract with Sony during development^note because a buried clause would have given Sony perpetual rights to Nintendo's games and instead contracted with Philips for the add-on (which never materialized^note but did spawn the infamous The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games), and dumped Sony in the most dickish way imaginable to Japanese businessmen (news of the change was withheld from Sony until the day of the CES, and then announced in front of an audience), Sony turned to Sega... only to be laughed at by the Sega execs, who claims that Sony knows nothing about the video games industry. This resulted in them turning the peripheral into a stand-alone console and entering the game market themselves, determined to teach Nintendo and Sega a lesson...which they did, displacing Nintendo's position at the top of the game industry with the PlayStation while contributing to the death of Sega's hardware business, and then retaining their stranglehold on the market with the PlayStation 2, forcing Nintendo to re-think gaming entirely in order to get back on top with the Wii. To be fair, however, Sony's hands aren't clean in this. It was discussed not too long ago in an interview following the revelation of the prototype that Sony, or more specifically, Ken Kutaragi, designer of the sound chip for the Super NES, approached Nintendo about creating a CD-ROM add-on. At the time, Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi did not see much point in such a peripheral and assumed that gamers would not respond well to loading times, and initially refused the deal. Sony assured him they would only publish everything BUT video games on the new media. Nintendo told them, "Do your CD-ROM thing." Sony, however, had been expanding from a mere electronics company into a conglomerate, having spun off an insurance company with Prudential in the late '70s, and in the span of the final two years of the '80s, signed deals to purchase both CBS Records and Columbia Pictures. Most tellingly perhaps, in its first example of this trope, Sony even formed Sony Imagesoft, its first software development and publishing wing. Nintendo's CEO at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, was furious when he realized their true intentions and thought it was a great insult, and decided to fight fire with fire by humiliating Sony in public in return. It's easy to see this event as the cause of Sony's entry into the market, but Sony already had planned to manufacture their OWN SNES CD-ROM/cart units, titled Play Station^note including the aforementioned prototype, which left Nintendo out of the equation, meaning that Sony was just using Nintendo. And indeed, one of the use cases for the Super Disc format discovered via BIOS, was for an ebook format used in players Sony released in the Summer of 1990, corroborating with Sony's penchant for creating their own media in hopes of defining new standards in hopes of scoring royalties (see: Betamax, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, UMD, and even Blu-ray). We may never know where Ken's true intentions lay, since he had been mostly going it alone^note even having to urge the rest of Sony to take Nintendo's abandonment lying down, but the promise of a new media standard in an emergent industry, especially considering the undignified loss Betamax suffered to VHS in the home video wars, was no doubt thrown in to sweeten the deal to the rest of Sony.
• Similar to the above, Atari passed up an opportunity to distribute the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US, leaving Nintendo to market and distribute the NES on its own. You know what happened next. Many video game fans think that was for the best; while the NES would have come to North America a couple of years earlier, it's likely that Atari's mismanagement would've simply dragged Nintendo down with them, dooming the entire video game industry to a Japan-only niche.
• Treasure Co., Ltd. is a developer founded by the former employees of Konami. They are known for their action games with innovative design. They partner with large game developers and work with licensed titles.
• Vin Diesel was so tired of poorly-received licensed games based on his movies that he formed his own company, Tigon, with its first release being Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.
• Following Keiji Inafune quitting Capcom and forming his own company Comcept, Capcom's cancellation of Mega Man Universe and Mega Man Legends 3 (the latter of which Inafune was heavily invested in and had wanted to make for years), and Capcom making no more Mega Man games aside from the poorly-received Rockman X Over, Inafune started a crowdfunding campaign for a new game, Mighty No. 9, a new Mega Man game in all but name. The Kickstarter for the game managed to raise its $900,000 goal in just over a day. The final sum raised? A whopping 3.8 million US Dollars. Unfortunately, it didn't end positively despite getting off to a great start. They ended up being bought out by Level-5.
• Monolith Soft was founded by staff from Squaresoft, notably the developers behind Xenogears and Chrono Cross. This was due to the staff wanting to do to a follow-up to the former, but the company was becoming heavily focused on Final Fantasy, in particular, their new computer-generated film. Monolith Soft would be financed by Namco, developing the Xenosaga series under them, until they would be bought by Nintendo just after the Wii launched.
• After being sold to Microsoft from Nintendo, many of Rare's employees had left the company over a period of a few years. Most of them have since banded together to form a new company called Playtonic Games. Their crowdfunded project Yooka-Laylee managed to hit their funding goal of £175,000 (US$270,041) in 38 minutes of being launched.
• Yu Suzuki was Kicked Upstairs after the failure of the Shenmue series (which did cost Sega a lot financially). He left the company to start Ys Net, and after years of silence, has come forward to crowdsource for the next installment in the Shenmue series, much to the joy of the fandom.
• Hideo Kojima spent much of 2015 living an absolute hell since Konami canceled Silent Hills, closed down his studio, Kojima Productions, removed his name from the cover of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and even forbade him from accepting any awards the latter game won. As soon as his contract with Konami expired, he re-established Kojima Productions as a separate company.
• Victor Ireland was the president of Working Designs since he transformed it from an office software developer to a video game publishing company in 1990, four years after its founding. After Working Designs shut down in December 2005, Ireland formed Gaijinworks seven months later, with the rest of his staff joining him.
• The video game Jawbreaker was a case of this. It started out as a near-perfect port of Pac-Man for the Atari 8-Bit Computers done by On-Line Systems. However once Atari caught wind of it, rather than do the decent thing and license the program, they attempted to bully the programmer into giving them the game. As a result, Jawbreaker was released as its own game.
• Jersey Jack Pinball was started when game distributor Jack Guarnieri noticed his customers wanted expensive pinball games with deep rules and lots of mechanical toys, but Stern Pinball was moving towards simpler, low-budget tables. Jack decided the only solution was to start his own company and make the types of games that his buyers wanted.
• It's been suggested that this trope was what inspired the inception of 2-D fighting game Beast's Fury by Evil Dog Productions; the leader of the development team, Ryhan Stevens, wanted the same fame and recognition (if not more) as Skullgirls, which had enjoyed a very successful crowdfunding campaign. The game would later be canceled in 2016 following a contentious production and online acrimony towards Skullgirls fans, which left the reputations of Stevens and Evil Dog tarnished.
• A successful example of this trope: Eric Barone, having just graduated from college (computer science) decided to start making a game for fun and to practice his programming, he was a big fan of Harvest Moon, but considered the series to had gone downhill after Back to Nature and was unable to find something he thought was a suitable substitute for PC. He started to develop a Harvest Moon clone under the moniker ConcernedApe, but the project gradually grew in scope, and four years later, Stardew Valley was born.
• Natsume were the people that translated Marvelous main franchise, Bokujō Monogatari, under the name Harvest Moon. However, Marvelous dropped Natsume and went with XSEED Games, a U.S.-based localizer and publisher of Japanese games that became a subsidiary of Marvelous a year earlier. However, since Natsume owns the rights to the Harvest Moon name, they decided to make their own and keep the series going. Bokujō Monogatari is now released under the name Story of Seasons.
• With Doom being very friendly to modded content, this hilariously happened one time with the release of Doom: Rampage Edition. A mod infamous for its... quality. One reviewer said he could pull a better wad (Doom mod files were called WADs) from out of his ass. Lo and behold, three weeks later said reviewer came out with a mod: A Better Wad Pulled From My Ass.
• In 2015, Tencent acquired Riot Games and requested them to make a mobile port of their global smash hit, League of Legends. Riot at the time declined, considering League to be too sophisticated of a game to try and simplify for a smartphone's interface, which Tencent then responded with "very well, then we'll try making a mobile MOBA ourselves." (thankfully for Tencent, two of their subsidiaries, TiMi and L&Q, actually believed in the potential on the get-go, unlike Riot.) The end result was Honor of Kings (adapted internationally as Arena of Valor)^note Initially it was more of a direct knockoff of League called League of Kings, but after receiving enough complaints from Riot as being borderline plagiarism, Tencent took additional time for significant retooling to form its own identity (by TiMi after an intercompany encouraged rivalry with L&Q, to which they bounced back from defeat), which then became an enormous smash hit in its own right, becoming the most popular mobile property in their native China by the end of the decade. Ironically, its powerhouse success convinced Riot to reconsider their stance on mobile MOBAs, leading to their mobile port of League being developed and released in late 2019 (Tencent would temporarily halt their plans of marketing Arena of Valor in western regions to allow Riot to make their announcements, so it seems there are no hard feelings in the matter).
• Fire Emblem creator Shouzou Kaga left Intelligent Systems shortly after the release of Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 for still undisclosed reasons ^note Theories abounds: some says Kaga left over disagreements regarding the direction the games were going, others says he was actually fired over the rather mercurial development of Thracia776 along with Kaga's alleged bullheaded refusal to modernize the series to appeal to modern audiences.. Kaga went and formed Tirnanog studios, eventually released TearRing Saga for the Playstation. The game turned to be such a blatant Fire Emblem ripoff that Nintendo took both Tirnanog and game publisher Enterbrain to court. Things were settled out of court and all those involve would rather not talk about it ever again.

Other

Other

• According to some of Charles M. Schulz's autobiographical books, the reason why Hello Kitty and Sanrio characters came into existence was due to a disagreement he had with the company. Sanrio also grew tired of paying royalty fees to Schulz. ^note  Sanrio had merchandise rights for Snoopy back in the 60s and early 70s. As a result, the company decided to create its own characters. In later years, the company gained back the merchandise rights to the Peanuts franchise in Japan.
• Faction Paradox started out as characters in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, specifically the Eighth Doctor Adventures. When someone else was allowed to write a novel that not only changed the Faction's whole character but also derailed his plans for portraying the Time War they were involved in, their creator decided to spin the Faction off into their own series with its own, separate mythos.
• After getting fired from Gamespot for undisclosed reasons (though the most popular is for giving a mediocre review to Kane & Lynch: Dead Men while the game was advertised on the site), Jeff Gerstmann went off to start the gaming news site Giant Bomb alongside other former Gamespot journalists. Ironically, they would end up becoming a sister site to Gamespot when Giant Bomb got purchased by then Gamespot's parent company, ViacomCBS.
• Fred Rogers went into television precisely because he hated it so and thought there could be a better way of using it to educate young children — thus was born Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He especially took objection to the emphasis television put on violence (the first thing he ever saw on TV was a pie fight) and advertising (which led to him quitting his job with NBC to work in public television instead).
  • When Fred moved back to the U.S. from Canada to continue Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for what was then called NET, his understudy Ernie Coombs stayed in Canada and created his own show, Mr. Dressup.
• Esperanto, along with any other constructed language.
  • Ido, its most popular offshoot.
• Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse in the Crimean War, was rejected by Florence Nightingale for being black, so she started her own hospital on the front line of the British Hotel. She was ten times more involved than Florence and went to the front line herself. She died penniless, but she has been remembered by history, no matter if no one really remembers who she was outside of certain circles.
• Kunihiko Ikuhara directed the second to fourth season of the 90s version of Sailor Moon. But when Toei Animation didn't give him enough creative control for SuperS he decided to create his own shoujo series.
• When the Sony forums were hacked in 2011, the fanbases for their two biggest game show properties (Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!) migrated to fan forums and have been there ever since.
• After Jean Chalopin left Dic Entertainment, he went on to found his own company, C&D^note Standing for Créativité et Devéloppement", just as "D.i.C" had (originally) stood for "Diffusion, information, et Communication"., which had produced its shows in a similar style.
• The hotel chain America's Best Value Inn was started in 1999, and most of its first properties at the time were recently rebranded from other chains (predominantly Best Western and unbranded properties). The same is true of rival Magnuson Hotels.
• In 1981, directer Larry Cohen was removed from the director's chair of a remake of I, the Jury, just before filming began.^note Though he still got screenplay credit. Since he already had shooting space reserved, he decided to use it to shoot his own movie. That movie turned out to be Q: The Winged Serpent.
• Adam Pacitti, Adam Blampied, Jack King, Ross Tweddell, and Sam Driver resigned from WhatCulture in fall 2017. By November, four of them ^note Blampied's contract was terminated after he confessed to soliciting female fans onlinehad formed a new wrestling-themed YouTube channel, Cultaholic.
• After making his internet fortune, Elon Musk spent quite a bit of time attempting to purchase space rockets from the Russian government to support a philanthropic pro-Mars-exploration venture he had his eye on. After several failed attempts, he decided he'd just make the rockets on his own and funded SpaceX
  • Likewise, Musk spent time keeping up on the latest efforts in the automotive industry towards the wide-scale development and production of electric cars, and repeatedly urged the company AC Propulsion to pursue broader development of its tzero prototype - something the company utterly refused to do. Shortly thereafter, Musk would co-found Tesla Motors, which became Tesla Inc. once it expanded into solar energy and large-capacity batteries.
• In Malaysia, Chatime attempted to wrest control of the stores from the franchisee of the time in 2017 due to the usage of ingredients that are from suppliers instead of from Chatime themselves, as well as the franchisee not paying the royalties in licensing for the rights to use the name. The franchisee's response? Immediately cutting ties and rebranding to Tealive. Although Chatime did try taking the franchisee to court (they lost the case in Malaysia, although they tried again in Singapore and the battle is ongoing). Chatime opened their own stores in Malaysia a year later in 2018, also making this a case of Create Your Own Villain.
• Some of the biggest names in roller coaster manufacturing today are spinoffs from other companies.
  • Bolliger & Mabillard have designed over 117 roller coasters around the world. The company's founders, Walter Bolliger and Claude Mabillard, originally began as engineers at Giovanola, a contractor to roller coaster manufacturer Intamin. During their time at Giovanola, they helped design the company's first stand-up roller coaster, Shockwave at Six Flags Magic Mountain.^note Later the defunct Batman The Escape at the defunct Six Flags Astroworld They also worked on other projects, such as Z-Force at Six Flags Great America.^note Which was the only ever "space dive coaster" built. It ran at Six Flags Great America until 1987, then as part of a ride rotation program Six Flags implemented at the time, rotated to Six Flags over Georgia for three years, then ended up at Six Flags Magic Mountain from 1993 until its demolition in 2006 In 1987, a change of management at Giovanola led Bolliger and Mabillard to leave and start their own firm, originally comprised of just themselves and two draftsmen.^note Giovanola continued to use the two engineers' box track design, which is seen on their two hypercoasters, Goliath at Six Flags Magic Mountain and Titan at Six Flags Over Texas This was all they were made of when they built their first roller coaster, Iron Wolf at Six Flags Great America, in 1990.^note Now converted into a floorless coaster called Firebird at Six Flags America In 1992, they built their first inverted coaster, Batman: The Ride at Six Flags Great America, and from there on, the rest is history.
  • Great Coasters International, one of the leading names in wooden roller coasters in the 21st century, was founded by Mike Boodley, a designer at the 1990s wooden roller coaster construction firm of Custom Coasters International.
    • Custom Coasters International themselves were more or less the successors to the Dinn Corporation, on account of their founders being the two children of Dinn Corp.'s founder Charles Dinn. When CCI went bankrupt and liquidated in 2002, most of its designers stuck together to constitute a new firm called The Gravity Group, best known for their construction of The Voyage at Holiday World (the world's second longest wooden roller coaster behind only The Beast at Kings Island).
• Sometime after Nelvana co-founder Michael Hirsh left the company, he bought the assets of the crumbling CINAR to create his own company, Cookie Jar Entertainment.
• In 2015, Joel Hodgson launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to resurrect Mystery Science Theater 3000 and sold the rights to air the new seasons on Netflix. When Netflix declined to make a third season and the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, Joel decided to go back to Kickstarter to not only resurrect the series again, but make his own streaming service, inspired by the change in filmmaking the pandemic pushed.
• Nikita Khrushchev proposed building the Soviet Union's very own Disneyland following a much-publicized incident where the Soviet Premier was barred from entering ostensibly due to security concerns. Wonderland, as it was called, was conceived as "the entire Soviet Union in miniature" instead of focusing on a fantasy world sprinkled with various fictional characters as is with Disneyland's, affording Soviet children the chance to appreciate the country's diversity. While the Wonderland idea never came to fruition due to Khrushchev's removal from power in 1964, the Moscow-based Dream Island picked up where Khrushchev's project left off, and offered its own takes on Disney's attractions, even adapting Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen story in an effort to evoke Elsa from Frozen.
• As Paul Wernick worked on Big Brother 2, he and friend Rhett Rheese decided to do their own take of reality television, resulting in the satirical The Joe Schmo Show.
• When Jeremy Clarkson got fired from Top Gear, co-hosts James May and Richard Hammond both quit the show in solidarity. The three of them then went on to create The Grand Tour.
• After William J. Abbott stepped down as CEO of Crown Media, Hallmark's television channels holding unit, he bought Great American Country from Discovery Inc., formed GAC Media and re-launched the network as GAC Family, positioning it as a competitor to the Hallmark Channel by hiring away a number of actors associated with Hallmark programming for the purposes of starring in GAC Family's original content and picking up the rights to several shows that Hallmark had cancelled.
• Jared Mauch, a rural Michigan resident who was sick of not being able to get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, built a fiber ISP, albeit with the help of some government assistance and an angel investor or two. He subsequently expanded his ISP service's network across his area using government grants, and the broadband community generally applauded his attempts to take matters in his own hands.
• The Escapist experienced a mass exodus in 2023 following the sudden firing of then-editor in chief Nick Calandra — reportedly due to the site's owners being dissatisfied with Calandra's efforts of repairing the site's brand following its earlier mass layoffs in 2018 — with all the site's video producers resigning in solidarity. Shortly afterwards, Calandra and Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw began Second Wind, a similar creator-owned outlet for them and other former Escapist creators to continue their content fully independently.

---