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Tsunami Games (or Tsunami Media, Inc.) was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1991 by former employees of Sierra Entertainment (then known as Sierra On-Line). [1] The company was based in Oakhurst, California, which at the time was also the home of Sierra. Between 1992 and 1996 Tsunami published several games, most notably adventure games and interactive movies, before becoming defunct.
Tsunami Games was formed in 1991 by Edmond Heinbockel, former chief financial officer of Sierra On-Line. Its early games were point-and-click adventure games including Ringworld: Revenge of The Patriarch , which was based on the Ringworld novels by Larry Niven. Blue Force , a police procedural adventure game, was designed by Jim Walls, the former designer of the Police Quest series at Sierra. Also notable was Protostar: War on the Frontier (1993), a space exploration and adventure game in the style of Starflight .
Tsunami made three interactive movies. Flash Traffic: City of Angels (1994) and Silent Steel (1995) are full-motion video-based games in which the player watches video clips and is asked to choose one of three options approximately every 15 seconds. These choices generally affect the game's story. Silent Steel was reportedly honored by PC Entertainment Magazine for "Best Use of Live-Action Footage" in a CD-ROM game. [1] The third "interactive movie" is Man Enough, a dating sim which includes ostensibly "sexy" live-action video sequences. [2]
Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, a rotating wheel artificial world, an alien construct in space 186 million miles in diameter. Niven later added three sequel novels and then cowrote, with Edward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute the Fleet of Worlds series. All the novels in the Ringworld series tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970, as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971.
Full-motion video (FMV) is a video game narration technique that relies upon pre-recorded video files to display action in the game. While many games feature FMVs as a way to present information during cutscenes, games that are primarily presented through FMVs are referred to as full-motion video games or interactive movies.
Sexual content has been found in video games since the early days of the industry, and games featuring sexual content can be found on most platforms and can be of any video game genre.
James Walls is an American former police officer and video game designer. Walls joined the California Highway Patrol in 1971, retiring after 15 years on the force after a shooting incident that left him traumatized.
Lure of the Temptress is a point-and-click adventure game published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in June 1992 for Atari ST, MS-DOS, and Amiga. It was the first game developed by Revolution Software and uses their proprietary Virtual Theatre engine. The player assumes the role of Diermot, a young peasant who has to overthrow an evil sorceress. The game was well-received and re-released as freeware on April 1, 2003.
King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow is a point-and-click adventure game, first released in 1992 as the sixth installment in the King's Quest series produced by Sierra On-Line. Written by Roberta Williams and Jane Jensen, King's Quest VI is widely recognized as the high point in the series for its landmark 3D graphic introduction movie and professional voice acting. King's Quest VI was programmed in Sierra's Creative Interpreter and was the last King's Quest game to be released on floppy disk. A CD-ROM version of the game was released in 1993, including more character voices, a slightly different opening movie and more detailed artwork and animation.
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. While they are most well known working together designing the Quest for Glory series, both are notable separately for designing games and game engines independently of each other.
Stormfront Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer based in San Rafael, California. In 2007, the company had over 50 developers working on two teams, and owned all its proprietary engines, tools, and technology. As of the end of 2007, over fourteen million copies of Stormfront-developed games had been sold. Stormfront closed on March 31, 2008, due to the closure of their publisher at the time, Sierra Entertainment.
Trimark Pictures was an American production company that specialized in the production and distribution of television and home video motion pictures. The company was formed in 1984 by Mark Amin as Vidmark Entertainment with Vidmark Inc. established as the holding company. As a small studio, Trimark produced and released theatrical, independent, television and home video motion pictures. The logo features a triangle with a profile of a tiger's head.
Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers is a 1991 graphic adventure game by Sierra On-Line. It was released on floppy disks on March 4, 1991, and released on CD-ROM in December 1992 with full speech support and featuring Laugh-In announcer Gary Owens as the voice of the narrator. It featured 256-color hand painted graphics and a fully mouse-driven interface. It was one of the first video games to use motion capture animation. It cost over US$1,000,000 to produce and sold more than its three predecessors combined. An Atari ST version was announced via Sierra Online's magazine, Sierra News Magazine, but was later canceled.
Lost in Time is a computer adventure game developed and published by Coktel Vision in 1993. It was promoted as being "The first Interactive Adventure Film using Full Motion Video Technology" and contained four graphical elements: full motion video, hand painted and digitized backgrounds and 3D decor.
Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure is an adventure game designed by Haruhiko Shono and first released by Synergy Interactive in 1993, following his earlier works Alice: An Interactive Museum (1991) and L-Zone (1992). Like Shono's earlier titles, Gadget uses pre-rendered 3D computer graphics and resembles a point-and-click adventure game similar to Myst (1993), but with a strictly linear storyline culminating in a fixed finale. It thus sometimes tends to be classified more as an interactive movie rather than a video game. The story centers around a future dominated by retro technology from the 1920s and 1930s, especially streamlined locomotives and flying machines.
Peter Ledger was an Australian cartoonist, comic book artist, commercial airbrush artist, and illustrator.
Protostar: War on the Frontier is a 1993 science fiction video game produced by Tsunami Media that blends elements of role-playing, space exploration, space combat, and strategy. The player commands a spaceship from a first-person perspective in real-time capable of traveling to the various planets in the game world and launching an explorer vessel to traverse their surfaces. Several sentient alien races inhabit the region with whom the player interacts through friendly conversation, intense spaceship combat, or barter at their planetary trading posts. One of these races, the Skeetch, is aggressively threatening to conquer the Earth; the player has been recruited to convince the other sentient races in the region to join humanity in an alliance against the Skeetch. A secondary goal of the game is to earn money by performing actions such as selling alien lifeforms and minerals collected on planetary surfaces to obtain the funds needed to upgrade the player's spaceship and improve the odds of survival in confrontations with the Skeetch and other hostile entities. Computer Gaming World criticized the game for failing to break new ground and for its "muddled" blend of science fiction themes, but did recommend it to players new to this genre.
Flash Traffic: City of Angels is a game developed by Tsunami Games and published by Time Warner Interactive for DOS systems in 1994.
Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch is a 1993 video game by Tsunami Games for DOS. It is based on Larry Niven's Ringworld novel series. A sequel, Return to Ringworld, was released in 1994.