Atari is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French company Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, California, USA in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and home computers. The company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Sid Meier's Civilization is a 1991 turn-based strategy 4X video game developed and published by MicroProse. The game was originally developed for MS-DOS running on a PC, and it has undergone numerous revisions for various platforms. The player is tasked with leading an entire human civilization over the course of several millennia by controlling various areas such as urban development, exploration, government, trade, research, and military. The player can control individual units and advance the exploration, conquest and settlement of the game's world. The player can also make such decisions as setting forms of government, tax rates and research priorities. The player's civilization is in competition with other computer-controlled civilizations, with which the player can enter diplomatic relationships that can either end in alliances or lead to war.
Tetris is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s. After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, in 1996 the rights reverted to Pajitnov, who co-founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.
Sidney K. Meier is an American businessman and computer programmer. A programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the Civilization series, Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bill Stealey and is the Director of Creative Development of Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. For his contributions to the video game industry, Meier was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
John Wilbur Stealey Sr. is an American game developer and publisher who founded MicroProse with Sid Meier. He also founded and is the current CEO of iEntertainment Network.
Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity is an adventure game by Spectrum HoloByte, based on the Star Trek universe. It was released in 1995 for the DOS and later ported to the Macintosh. It puts the player in control of Captain Picard and his crew of the Enterprise D and features traditional point-and-click adventure gameplay as well as free-form space exploration, diplomatic encounters and tactical ship-to-ship combat.
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.
Falcon 4.0 is a combat flight simulation video game developed by MicroProse and published by Hasbro Interactive in 1998. The game is based around a realistic simulation of the Block 50/52 F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighter in a full-scale modern war set in the Korean Peninsula.
Ocean Software Ltd was a British software development company that became one of the biggest European video game developers and publishers of the 1980s and 1990s.
Jeffery L. Briggs is the American founder and former President and CEO of Firaxis Games, a video game developer based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States. He was previously a game designer at MicroProse but left that company in 1996 along with Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds to form Firaxis Games.
1996 saw many sequels and prequels in video games, such as Super Mario 64, Duke Nukem 3D, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Super Mario RPG, King's Field III, Virtua Fighter 3, along with new titles such as Blazing Heroes, NiGHTS into Dreams..., Crash Bandicoot, Pokémon Red/Green/Blue, Resident Evil, Dead or Alive, Quake and Tomb Raider.
Dave Ellis is an author, video game writer and video game designer. He is also an avid classic arcade game collector and was a columnist for Gameroom Magazine.
The Falcon line of computer games is a series of simulations of the F-16 Fighting Falcon combat aircraft. The games, mostly published by Spectrum HoloByte, were noted for their high level of realism unseen in contemporary simulation games.
Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy video games, first released in 1991. Sid Meier developed the first game in the series and has had creative input for most of the rest, and his name is usually included in the formal title of these games, such as Sid Meier's Civilization VI. There are six main games in the series, a number of expansion packs and spin-off games, as well as board games inspired by the video game series. The series is considered a formative example of the 4X genre, in which players achieve victory through four routes: "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate".
Gilman Louie is an American technology venture capitalist who got his start as a video game designer and then co-founded and ran the CIA venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. With his company Nexa Corporation he designed and developed multiple computer games such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon flight simulator series. His company later merged with Spectrum Holobyte where he was CEO until its acquisition by Hasbro, after which he became Chief Creative Officer and General Manager of its Games.com group. He has served on a number of boards of directors, including Wizards of the Coast, Niantic, Total Entertainment Network, FASA Interactive, Wickr, Aerospike, the Chinese American International School, Markle Foundation, and Digital Promise. He is chairman of the Federation of American Scientists and Vricon. He is a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
Falcon 3.0 is a combat flight simulator video game developed by Sphere Inc. and published by Spectrum HoloByte in 1991 as third official main entry in the Falcon series of the F-16 Fighting Falcon simulators.
Manley & Associates was an independent software developer, founded in 1982, which developed or ported over 70 video games, multimedia, and educational entertainment titles which were published by other companies, including Electronic Arts, Activision, Disney, GameTek, Publishing International, and Spectrum HoloByte. Many of the company's early games were one or two person projects created in founder Ivan Manley's house, but eventually it grew to roughly 60 people working from an office park in Issaquah, Washington.
Top Gun: Fire at Will is a video game developed and published by Spectrum HoloByte for DOS, Windows, PlayStation, and Mac OS. It is a licensed game in the Top Gun franchise. A sequel, Top Gun: Hornet's Nest, was released in 1998.
Falcon is a combat flight simulator video game and the first official entry in the Falcon series of the F-16 jet fighter's simulators by Spectrum HoloByte. Originally developed by Sphere for Macintosh and MS-DOS in 1987 and ported to several platforms between 1988 and 1992, the game earned commercial success and critical acclaim.
Magic Bytes is an international video game publishing label. It originated in Germany as the primary computer game brand of micro-partner Software GmbH, already active since 1986 and dedicated to the internal development of some of the games. Initially, Bertelsmann subsidiary Ariolasoft and Gremlin Graphics in the United Kingdom distributed most Magic Bytes games.
