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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | , |
| Products | Dead Cells , Die2Nite |
Number of employees | 8 [1] |
| Website | motiontwin |
Motion Twin is an independent video game development studio, that initially specialized in online video games and has most recently worked on roguelite games. Founded in 2001, the company is a worker cooperative enterprise based in Bordeaux, France.
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Motion Twin was founded in 2001 as a private limited company in France. [2] In 2004, they became a workers cooperative with equal salary and decision-making power between its members. [3] [4] The name Motion Twin refers to an animation technique, called motion tween, and the red star in the logo was chosen due to its revolutionary connotations. [5]
In the studio's early years, it made web-based games for its social gaming platform Twinoid. Motion Twin initially gained notice through the release of games such as Hammerfest, My Brute, Mush, Die2Nite, and AlphaBounce. By 2009, Motion Twin had 10 million registered users and 15 games. [6]
As the market for web games dried up, it attempted to move into mobile games, with little success. By this point, Motion Twin had briefly considered disbanding. [7]
Left with one "last chance" for the studio, Motion Twin developed Dead Cells. [7] It was made as the developers' "passion project" and "something hardcore, ultra-niche, with pixel art and ridiculous difficulty" that they thought would be a potential risk for gaining player interest. [8] Motion Twin initially attempted to make a follow-up to tower defense game Die2Nite, but most of the game mechanics were ultimately stripped out to focus on action-based combat. [9]
Dead Cells was released to Steam Early Access in May 2017 [8] and macOS and Linux on June 26, 2018. [10] It was released on Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch August 7. [11] An iOS version was released on August 28, 2019, and an Android version was released on June 3, 2020. [12] [13]
About a year from its early access release, Dead Cells sold over 730,000 units, [14] and exceeded 850,000 units just prior to its full release.[ citation needed ] By May 2019, within ten months of its full release, Dead Cells had accumulated sales of two million units. [15] In March 2021, Dead Cells had sold 5 million copies. [16] It reached 10 million copies sold in 2023. [17]
In 2019, Motion Twin created a new development team called Evil Empire that would take over development and support of Dead Cells, allowing other Motion Twin developers to start on their next project. [18] [19] Evil Empire is run by Steve Filby, Motion Twin's former head of marketing, and is not a cooperative, since the company wanted to scale beyond ten employees. Motion Twin continues to maintain creative control over Evil Empire's work on Dead Cells. [20] [21] In 2020, lead designer Sébastien Benard left Motion Twin to found his own solo studio. [22]
The game's first paid expansion, Dead Cells: The Bad Seed, was released on February 11, 2020. [23] A second paid DLC expansion, Dead Cells: Fatal Falls, was released on January 26, 2021. [24] The game's third paid expansion titled Dead Cells: The Queen and the Sea was released on January 7, 2022. [25] A fourth paid expansion, Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, was released on March 6, 2023. [26] There have also been over 30 free updates since the game's initial release. [27]
On December 7, 2023, Motion Twin announced its next game, Windblown, debuting a trailer at The Game Awards 2023. The game is characterized as a fast-paced isometric action game. [28]
On February 9, 2024, Motion Twin announced it would stop creating new content for Dead Cells, and Evil Empire would be moving on to new projects. [29] In April 2024, it was revealed that Evil Empire's next game is The Rogue Prince of Persia. It released into Early Access in May. [30]
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Following the success of Dead Cells, Motion Twin abandoned its web-based offerings. [31] With the end of Adobe Flash Player support on January 1, 2021, those games would be rendered unplayable. In order to keep the games online, a group of hobbyist set up Eternal-Twin (with Motion Twin's consent), which aims to re-create as many games as possible without using Adobe Flash Player. Thus, those who still want to play after Flash Player's end of life will be able to do so. [32] Motion Twin has also made the source code for many of its game available to the public under a creative commons license. [33]
Nicolas Cannasse, a former developer at Motion Twin, has been responsible for the creation of freeware and open source compilers and multimedia technologies, many of which build on the Adobe Flash platform.
His published products include:[ citation needed ]
The company, although known to the public for its browser games in flash, is at the origin of various tools and programming languages which it uses for its own developments, and which it makes available under a free license. [34] Under the impetus of one of its co-founders, Nicolas Canasse, the Bordeaux company is, for example, at the origin of the MTASC compiler, for Motion Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler, the first free ActionScript 2,0 compilers. [35]
Haxe, a technology considered to be the successor to the MTASC compiler, also invented and developed by Motion Twin, is a cross-platform language that makes it possible, from a single standardized language, to compile the same source file by targeting different platforms such as JavaScript, Flash, NekoVM, PHP or C++. This language was the subject of a book, Professional Haxe and Neko, by Franco Ponticelli and L. McColl-Sylveste, released in 2008 by John Wiley & Sons. [36]
Motion Twin has also developed its own virtual machine, called Neko. Neko is both a high-level, dynamically typed programming language whose source files, once compiled, can be run on the NekoVM virtual machine. The company is also the initiator of various libraries for the OCaml and PHP programming languages, such as the SPOD library, which allows persistence within a PHP environment. [37]
Adobe Flash is a discontinued multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich internet applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players.
A browser game is a video game that is played via the internet using a web browser. They are mostly free-to-play and can be single-player or multiplayer. Alternative names for the browser game genre reference their software platform used, with common examples being Flash games, and HTML5 games.
Albert Wesker is a character in the Resident Evil survival horror video game series created by the Japanese company Capcom. He was first introduced in the original Resident Evil (1996) as the captain of the Special Tactics and Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.) unit of the Raccoon Police Department. Wesker has been one of the series' main antagonists as a member of the pharmaceutical conglomerate Umbrella Corporation, the primary antagonistic faction, manipulating story events behind the scenes. To further his own plans, Wesker betrays his allies, fakes his death, gains superhuman abilities, and works with both Umbrella's mysterious rival company and their successors in the field of biological weapons development until his ultimate defeat by Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar in Resident Evil 5 (2009).
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Haxe is a high-level cross-platform programming language and compiler that can produce applications and source code for many different computing platforms from one code-base. It is free and open-source software, released under an MIT License. The compiler, written in OCaml, is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.
MTASC is an ActionScript 2.0 compiler written in the OCaml programming language by the company Motion Twin. It is free software and can be used alone or with other tools like swfmill to produce SWF files, which contain interactive multimedia content playable with the Flash Player. MTASC is also much faster than the Adobe Flash ActionScript compiler.
NekoVM is a virtual machine developed by Nicolas Cannasse as part of research and development (R&D) efforts at two independent video game developers in Bordeaux, France: first at Motion Twin and then at Shiro Games. NekoVM's native language is the bytecode for a high-level dynamically typed programming language called Neko. This pairing allows Neko to be used directly as an embedded scripting language, or to target NekoVM by compiling another language to NekoVM bytecode.
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Dead Cells is a 2018 roguelike-Metroidvania game developed by Motion Twin and Evil Empire, and published by Motion Twin. The player takes the role of an amorphous creature called the Prisoner. As the Prisoner, the player must fight their way out of a diseased island in order to slay the island's King. The player gains weapons, treasure and other tools through exploration of the procedurally-generated levels. Dead Cells features a permadeath system, causing the player to lose all items and other abilities upon dying. A currency called Cells can be collected from defeated enemies, allowing the player to purchase permanent upgrades.
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Evil Empire is a French video game developer based in Bordeaux, France. The company was created in 2019 by former Motion Twin employees to provide long term support for Dead Cells, and to let the former company focus on developing new IPs. Evil Empire worked on DLC and updates for Dead Cells until 2024, then launching its first original title, The Rogue Prince of Persia in early access.
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