Founded in October 2002 by former members of EA Black Box who've worked on games such as Sega Soccer Slam and NHL Hitz titles.

Their first project was NHL Hitz Pro, which was published by Midway Games in 2003 and followed up from EA Black Box's prior entries in the NHL Hitz series.

The company is best known for its work with Nintendo, the Mario Strikers games and Punch-Out!!

[4][5] In that same interview, co-founder Jason Carr and producer Ken Yeeloy revealed that it was Nintendo who approached Next Level Games in the first place to develop Super Mario Strikers for the GameCube due to much of the team's prior work on Sega Soccer Slam at EA Black Box.

[6] In January 2021, Nintendo announced that it had purchased Next Level Games after "A number of owner-directors recently determined that the time is right for them to sell their shares, and NLG therefore began exploring potential sale transactions".