Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the designers and programmers responsible for its games as "software artists." EA published numerous games and some productivity software for personal computers, all of which were developed by external individuals or groups until 1987's Skate or Die!. The company shifted toward internal game studios, often through acquisitions, such as Distinctive Software becoming EA Canada in 1991.
Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres of three-dimensional (3D) games and has seen adoption by other industries, most notably the film and television industry. Written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms.
The Bitmap Brothers are a British video game developer founded in 1987. The company entered the video game industry in 1988 with the scrolling shooter Xenon. They quickly followed with Speedball. Prior to becoming the publisher of their own games, early Bitmap Brothers titles were distributed by Image Works and Konami.
Crystal Dynamics, Inc. is an American video game developer that was founded in 1992 by Judy Lang, Madeline Canepa and Dave Morris. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was acquired by Eidos Interactive in 1998. After Square Enix's acquisition of Eidos in 2009, it became a subsidiary of Square Enix. Crystal Dynamics was the first licensed developer for 3DO. The company's mascot was the video game character Gex the Gecko until 2000.
Ready at Dawn Studios LLC (RAD) is an American video game developer located in Irvine, California and is composed of former members of Naughty Dog and Blizzard Entertainment. Formed in 2003, the company has primarily worked on games for the PlayStation Portable (PSP), most notably the Sony Computer Entertainment intellectual property God of War and Daxter. Ready at Dawn also now has a satellite campus in Portland, Oregon to assist with future PC and console game development. The studio is now part of Oculus Studios as of June 2020.
Santa Monica Studio is an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. A first-party studio for Sony Interactive Entertainment, it is best known for developing the God of War series. The studio was founded in 1999 by Allan Becker and was located in Santa Monica, California, until relocating to Playa Vista in 2014.
David Scott Jaffe is an American video game designer; best known for his contribution to the Twisted Metal and God of War franchises.
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Inc.'s Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X-exclusive game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms. It is particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development and used for games such as Pokémon Go, Monument Valley, Call of Duty: Mobile, Beat Saber and Cuphead. It is considered easy to use for beginner developers and is popular for indie game development.
Cory Barlog is an American video game designer, director, and writer who is the current creative director of video game developer Santa Monica Studio. He is best known for his work on God of War (2005), God of War II (2007), and God of War (2018).
God of War is an action-adventure game franchise created by David Jaffe at Sony's Santa Monica Studio. It began in 2005 on the PlayStation 2 (PS2) video game console, and has become a flagship title for the PlayStation brand, consisting of ten games across multiple platforms with an eleventh currently in development. Based in ancient mythology, the story follows the titular protagonist, Kratos, a Spartan warrior and later the God of War, who was tricked into killing his family by his former master, the original Greek god of war Ares. This sets off a series of events that leads to wars with the mythological pantheons. The Greek mythology era of the series sees Kratos follow a path of vengeance due to the machinations of the Olympian gods, while the Norse mythology era, which introduces his son Atreus as a secondary protagonist, shows an older Kratos on a path of redemption, which inadvertently brings the two into conflict with the Norse gods.
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation. It allows users to program games and play games created by other users. Created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in 2006, the platform hosts user-created games of multiple genres coded in the programming language Lua. For most of Roblox's history, it was relatively small, both as a platform and a company. Roblox began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s, and this growth has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pocket God is a game developed by Bolt Creative, in which the player manipulates an island and its inhabitants. It was released for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch on January 9, 2009, and released for Verizon Wireless on September 1, 2010, Android on December 1, 2010, and Windows Phone on December 4, 2010. The Facebook version was released December 23, 2010.
Pocket Gamer is a video game website that focuses on mobile, portable and handheld games. The site launched in 2005 and is published and owned by UK company Steel Media Ltd. The site covers all major portable and mobile gaming formats, including iPhone, iPad, Android, Nintendo Switch and others. It was one of the first to cover the iPhone gaming market. The publication also hands out awards for handheld games to recognize them in several categories. The British newspaper The Guardian at one time syndicated a list of recommended mobile games from Pocket Gamer, especially the list of recommended games for each month. In the years since launch, Steel Media Ltd has created many brand spin-offs, including the industry-facing PocketGamer.biz site and a series of conferences called Pocket Gamer Connects.
Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed by the Swedish video game developer Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before fully releasing in November 2011, with Jens "Jeb" Bergensten then taking over development. Minecraft has since been ported to several other platforms and is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 238 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active users as of 2021.
www.handy-games.com GmbH, doing business as HandyGames, is a German video game developer and publisher based in Giebelstadt. In July 2018, the company was acquired by THQ Nordic.
Zoë Tiberius Quinn is an American video game developer, programmer, and writer. Quinn developed the interactive fiction game Depression Quest, which was released in 2013. In 2014, a blog post by their ex-boyfriend sparked the online harassment campaign known as GamerGate, during which Quinn was subjected to extensive harassment including doxing, rape threats, and death threats. The following year, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a crisis hotline and resource center for victims of online harassment.
Vainglory is a free-to-play video game with in-game purchases, developed and published by Super Evil Megacorp for iOS, Android and PC. The game is a version of the MOBA wherein two opposing teams of three or five players fight to destroy the enemy by controlling the path between the bases, which is lined by turrets and guarded by AI-controlled enemy creatures called minions. Off the path, players battle for control points that provide resources. The game was released for iOS on November 16, 2014, after being soft-launched for over half a year, with the Android version being released on July 2, 2015. A Mac and Microsoft Windows version of the game was released in July 2018. Through cross-platform play, players on all four platforms can play together simultaneously.
Creative Mobile is an independent video game developer and publisher based in Tallinn, Estonia.
Alexis Kennedy is a British video game writer, designer and entrepreneur. His video game work includes Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator. He co-founded Weather Factory, an independent game studio in London in 2017. Kennedy founded Failbetter Games in 2009, where he worked as its chief narrative officer and creative lead until 2016.
Alanah Pearce is an Australian video game writer and journalist. Since 2020, Pearce has worked for American game developer Santa Monica Studio.
