Related Research Articles
Westwood Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer, based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was founded by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle in 1985 as Brelous Software, but got changed after 2 months into Westwood Associates and was renamed to Westwood Studios when Virgin Games bought the company in 1992. The company was bought by Electronic Arts alongside Virgin Interactive's North American operations in 1998. In January 2003, it was announced that Westwood, alongside Westwood Pacific, would be merged into EA Los Angeles. The main studio location closed in March of that year.
Bloodwych is a dungeon role-playing video game, a dungeon crawler, developed for the Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum. Its box featured artwork by Chris Achilleos. The plotline identifies the player as a champion of Trazere who, after recruiting up to three fellow champions, travels through dungeons and mazes fighting creatures along the way to find and destroy the evil Zendick, and banish the Lord of Entropy.
FTL Games was the video game development division of Software Heaven Inc. FTL created several popular video games in the 1980s. Despite the company's small size, FTL products were consistently number-one sellers and received the highest critical acclaim and industry awards.
SunDog: Frozen Legacy is a 1984 space trading and combat simulator video game. SunDog was first developed for the Apple II, with version 1.0 being released in March 1984, and version 1.1 released three weeks later. Version 2.0, which included enhancements and improved performance, was released in October, 1984. An enhanced version was released for the Atari ST in December 1985.
Eye of the Beholder is a role-playing video game for personal computers and video game consoles developed by Westwood Associates. It was published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in 1991, for the MS-DOS operating system and later ported to the Amiga, the Sega CD and the SNES. The Sega CD version features a soundtrack composed by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima. A port to the Atari Lynx handheld was developed by NuFX in 1993, but was not released. In 2002, an adaptation of the same name was developed by Pronto Games for the Game Boy Advance.
MicroProse is an American video game publisher and developer founded by Bill Stealey, Sid Meier, and Andy Hollis in 1982. It developed and published numerous games, including starting the Civilization and X-COM series. Most of their internally developed titles were vehicle simulation and strategy games.
Chris Taylor is a Canadian video game designer best known for Total Annihilation and the Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander series and co-founding the now-defunct studio Gas Powered Games. In 2002, GameSpy named him the "30th most influential person in gaming." In 2019, he revealed he has been working on Kanoogi, a cloud-based gaming platform, and developing his next game, Intergalactic Space Empire.
Chaos Strikes Back is an expansion and sequel to Dungeon Master, the earlier 3D role-playing video game. Chaos Strikes Back was released in 1989 and is also available on several platforms. It uses the same engine as Dungeon Master, with new graphics and a new, far more challenging, dungeon.
Dungeon Master is a role-playing video game featuring a pseudo-3D first-person perspective. It was developed and published by FTL Games for the Atari ST in 1987, almost identical Amiga and PC (DOS) ports following in 1988 and 1992.
Gauntlet is a 1985 fantasy-themed hack-and-slash arcade game developed and released by Atari Games. It is noted as being one of the first multiplayer dungeon crawl arcade games. The core design of Gauntlet comes from 1983 Atari 8-bit dungeon crawl game Dandy, which resulted in a threat of legal action. It also bears striking similarities to the action-adventure maze game Time Bandit (1983).
Jon Freeman is a game designer and co-founder of software developer Automated Simulations, which was later renamed to Epyx and became a major company during the 8-bit era of home computing. He is married to game programmer Anne Westfall, and they work together as Free Fall Associates. Free Fall is best known for Archon: The Light and the Dark, one of the earliest titles from Electronic Arts.
The Coles is a colloquial term referring to Corey Cole and Lori Ann Cole, a husband and wife team who are both video game designers. Working together they designed the Quest for Glory. They have also each designed games independently.
Jon Van Caneghem is an American video game director, designer and producer. He is best known for launching development studio New World Computing in 1983, making his design debut in 1986 with Might and Magic Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum. During the company's 20-year lifespan, Van Caneghem was involved in the creation and direction of several franchises, including the Might and Magic role-playing series and the spin-off Heroes of Might and Magic and King's Bounty strategy series.
Rebecca Ann Heineman is an American video game designer and programmer. Heineman was a founding member of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She has been chief executive officer for Olde Sküül since 2013.
Synergistic Software was a video game developer based in Seattle. Founded in 1978, the company published some of the earliest available games and applications for the Apple II family of computers. They continued developing games for various platforms into the late 1990s.
Cathryn Mataga is a game programmer and founder of independent video game company Junglevision. Under the name William, she wrote Atari 8-bit family games for Synapse Software in the early to mid 1980s, including Shamus, a flip-screen shooter.
Freescape is a video game engine, an early 3D game engine used in video games such as 1987's Driller. Graphics were composed mostly of solid geometry rendered without shading.
Timothy Cain is an American video game developer best known as the creator, producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of the 1997 computer game Fallout. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
Dandy is a dungeon crawl maze game for the Atari 8-bit family published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1983. It is one of the first video games with four-player, simultaneous cooperative play. Players equipped with bows and unlimited arrows fight through a maze containing monsters, monster spawners, keys, locked doors, food, and bombs in search of the exit leading to the next level. If a player dies, they can be revived by finding and shooting a heart. The game includes an editor for making new dungeons.
References
- ↑ Bell, Doug. "Profile for Doug Bell". Amazon. Retrieved 2008-06-17.
- ↑ Stahl, Edwin Robert (2002). "Exploring the Virtual Frontier: The Evolution of Narrative Form in Immersive Video Games" (PDF). St Louis University. p. 45. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-06-26. Retrieved 2008-06-19.
- ↑ McFerran, Damien (2006). "The Making of Dungeon Master" (PDF). Issue 34. Retro Gamer Magazine. pp. 30–31. Retrieved 9 May 2015.
- ↑ "Defiance game credits". Moby Games.
