Edward Alexander Del Castillo | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 14, 1968 |
| Citizenship |  USA |
| Known for | Founder, Executive President, and Chief Creative Officer of Liquid Entertainment. |
Edward Del Castillo is the Founder, Executive President, and Chief Creative Officer of Liquid Entertainment.
Prior to founding Liquid, he served as Senior Producer for Lord British Studios and Firaxis within Origin Systems. [1] There he created, developed, and produced the first three-dimensional Ultima game, advised on Ultima Online, and produced Sid Meier's Gettysburg!. Within Lord British Studios, he pioneered and managed the transition from two dimensional gaming to three dimensions, including creating the design, art and code pipelines necessary to transition the entire department from two- to three-dimensional gaming. [2] [3]
Prior to his work at Origin, Del Castillo worked at Westwood Studios, where he served as the producer on the original Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, and Red Alert, along with several expansions, ports, and other projects. On Command & Conquer and Red Alert, he was the primary creative and managerial force responsible for the creation, design, and production of all aspects of these titles. Under his supervision, these genre creating titles went on to become some of the most well awarded titles in gaming history. Del Castillo's deep understanding of game design has led him to be well published throughout the industry. [4]
As founder, president and chief creative officer of Liquid Entertainment, Del Castillo's first game was Battle Realms , published by Crave Entertainment and Ubisoft in November 2001 to critical acclaim. [5] Battle Realms is a real-time strategy PC game for Windows that features an unconventional approach to resource management and unit development. It was well received by reviewers, many of whom praised its state-of-the-art 3D engine and East Asian-inspired setting and aesthetics. It was nominated Best PC Strategy game of 2002 by The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, [6] and was chosen for Computer Gaming World's Top 10 Games of E3 2001. [7] Liquid Entertainment has since released multiple next-gen console titles and also mobile, social and casual games to critical success in its 15+ years in business. These titles include intellectual properties of The Lord of the Rings , ABC's Desperate Housewives , Marvel Comics' Thor and the Dungeons & Dragons series.
At the end of 2014, Ed reduced the size of Liquid Entertainment. Liquid continued as an IP holding company and consultancy that benefitted from its games that were available online.
In 2016 Ed became the COO of HERO Digital Entertainment, a joint venture funded by India company, JetSynthesys. Working with a US and India office he installed an efficient and world-class development and production process.[ citation needed ]
Beginning in 2018, Ed became a full-time consultant. He offers management advice on production methodologies.
He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, San Diego with a double minor in Visual Arts and Psychology. He was born on November 14, 1968, and has two sons with his wife, Carmen.
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.
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.
Looking Glass Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded by Paul Neurath with Ned Lerner as Blue Sky Productions in 1990, and merged with Lerner's Lerner Research in 1992 to become LookingGlass Technologies. Between 1997 and 1999, the company was part of Intermetrics and was renamed Looking Glass Studios. Following financial issues at Looking Glass, the studio shut down in May 2000.
Avalon Interactive Group, Ltd., formerly known as Virgin Interactive Entertainment, was a British video game distributor based within Europe that formerly traded as the video game publishing and distributing division of British conglomerate the Virgin Group.
Ultima IX: Ascension is a 1999 role-playing video game developed by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows. It is the ninth and final main installment of the Ultima series.
1997 saw many sequels and prequels in video games, such as Final Fantasy VII, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Quake II, Mega Man Legends, Riven, Tomb Raider II, Dark Rift, Tekken 3 and Virtua Striker 2, along with new titles such as Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Gran Turismo, Diablo, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout.
Command & Conquer is a real-time strategy video game developed and published by Westwood Studios in 1995. Set in an alternate history, the game tells the story of a world war between two globalized factions: the Global Defense Initiative of the United Nations and a revolutionary militant organization called the Brotherhood of Nod, led by the mysterious Kane.
Titus Interactive SA, known as Titus France SA until March 1999, was a French software publisher that produced and published video games for various platforms. Its head office was located in Parc de l'Esplanade in Lagny sur Marne in Greater Paris. At one time, it was instead located in Montfermeil, also in Greater Paris.
Liquid Entertainment was an American independent video game developer based in Pasadena, California. The studio was founded in April 1999 by Ed Del Castillo and Mike Grayford.
Crave Entertainment was an American video game publisher founded in 1997 by Nima Taghavi. Its headquarters was in Newport Beach, California. It was acquired by Handleman Company in 2005 in a deal valued up to $95,000,000 but was then sold to Fillpoint LLC in early 2009 for only $8,100,000 due to Handleman's bankruptcy and pending liquidation. During its lifetime it published games for Dreamcast, Wii, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, GameCube, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Xbox, and Xbox 360. Crave mainly focused on budget titles, and imported games such as Tokyo Xtreme Racer series.
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is a 2007 science fiction real-time strategy video game developed and published by Electronic Arts for Windows, Mac OS X and Xbox 360 platforms, and released internationally in March 2007. The game is a direct sequel to the 1999 game Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, and takes place roughly seventeen years after the game's expansion pack Firestorm, in which Tiberium has grown to become a considerable threat to the planet, leading to the world's political borders and territories being remade into zones denoting the level of contamination by the alien substance. The game's story sees the Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of Nod engage in a new global conflict, this time as major superpowers, only for the war to attract the attention of a new extraterrestrial faction known as the Scrin, which attacks both sides while harvesting Tiberium for its own purpose.
Battle Realms: Winter of the Wolf is an expansion pack for the real-time strategy video game Battle Realms, developed by Liquid Entertainment and co-published by Ubisoft and Crave Entertainment. The game was announced on July 7, 2002, and released on November 5, 2002, in North America.
Western role-playing video games are role-playing video games developed in the Western world, including the Americas and Europe. They originated on mainframe university computer systems in the 1970s, were later popularized by titles such as Ultima and Wizardry in the early- to mid-1980s, and continue to be produced for modern home computer and video game console systems. The genre's "Golden Age" occurred in the mid- to late-1980s, and its popularity suffered a downturn in the mid-1990s as developers struggled to keep up with changing fashion, hardware evolution and increasing development costs. A later series of isometric role-playing games, published by Interplay Productions and Blizzard Entertainment, was developed over a longer time period and set new standards of production quality.
Mark Skaggs is an American video game producer and executive. Skaggs is known for leading the team that created the Facebook game FarmVille for Zynga, leading the team that created CityVille. He served as Executive Producer and product lead for the PC real-time strategy games Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth.
The D.I.C.E. Award for Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year is an award presented annually by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences during the D.I.C.E. Awards. This award recognizes games "in which user directs or manipulates resources to create a set of conditions that result in success as determined within the confines of the game. These games can offer the user the chance to simulate or to virtually reproduce an experience, real or imaginary, which would require some form of equipment. Strategy games emphasize the planning of tactics rather than the execution". All active creative/technical, business, and affiliate members of the Academy are qualified to vote for this category. Originally, there were separate awards for strategy games and simulation games, which simulate aspects of the real world.