 |
 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Founder | David Rosen |
| Headquarters | , US |
Key people | David Rosen (CEO and lead programmer) Jeffrey Rosen (president) John Graham (COO) Aubrey Serr (lead artist) |
| Products | Lugaru Black Shades Overgrowth Receiver |
Number of employees | 4 [1] |
| Website | wolfire |
Wolfire Games is an American independent video game development company founded by David Rosen. Wolfire Games develops video games for macOS, Windows, and Linux. [2]
David Rosen founded Wolfire Games in 2003 to organize his open source video game contest entries. [3] After graduating from Swarthmore College in 2008, he was joined by his twin brother, Jeff, and two friends. In 2010, Wolfire ran the first Humble Bundle, later spun off as a separate company.[ citation needed ]
The company was awarded 5th Best Indie Game for their game Overgrowth by ModDB during the 7th Annual Mod of the Year Awards. [4]
The company operates a YouTube channel on which it releases game footage and highlights new features. [5]
The company name was inspired by "Wolfenstein", a stray dog the Rosen brothers adopted in 1996 and named for the video game series. [6]
In 2021, Wolfire Games filed a lawsuit against Valve Corporation alleging that Valve's video game storefront, Steam, uses its large market share to stifle competition and inflate the prices of games. [7]
Source is a 3D game engine developed by Valve. It debuted as the successor to GoldSrc in 2004 with the releases of Half-Life: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2. Updates to Source were released in incremental versions, with the engine being succeeded by Source 2 by the late 2010s.
Counter-Strike: Source is a tactical first-person shooter video game developed by Valve and Turtle Rock Studios. Released in October 2004 for Windows, it is a remake of Counter-Strike (2000) using the Source game engine. As in the original, Counter-Strike: Source pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won either by completing an objective or by eliminating all members of the enemy team. The game was initially bundled with all retail and digital copies of Half-Life 2, before being released standalone.
Lugaru: The Rabbit's Foot is the first commercial video game created by indie developer Wolfire Games. It is a cross-platform, open-source 3D action game. The player character is an anthropomorphic rabbit utilizing a wide variety of combat techniques to battle wolves and hostile rabbits. The name Lugaru is a phonetic spelling of "loup-garou", which is French for werewolf. It was well reviewed and was fairly well received among the shareware community, especially among Mac users. A sequel, Overgrowth, was released in 2017.
Frozenbyte, Inc. is a Finnish video game developer founded in 2001 and based in Helsinki. As of December 2020, it had approximately 130 employees. Frozenbyte's first commercial game was Shadowgrounds for Microsoft Windows. Both Shadowgrounds and its follow-up Shadowgrounds: Survivor were released for Linux in 2009, ported by IGIOS and published by Linux Game Publishing.
Mac gaming refers to the use of video games on Macintosh personal computers. In the 1990s, Apple computers did not attract the same level of video game development as Microsoft Windows computers due to the high popularity of Microsoft Windows and, for 3D gaming, Microsoft's DirectX technology. In recent years, the introduction of Mac OS X and support for Intel processors has eased porting of many games, including 3D games through use of OpenGL and more recently Apple's own Metal API. Virtualization technology and Boot Camp also permit the use of Windows and its games on Macintosh computers. Today, a growing number of popular games run natively on macOS, though as of early 2019, a majority still require the use of Microsoft Windows.
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms. It is particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development, is considered easy to use for beginner developers, and is popular for indie game development.
The operating system Linux can be used for playing video games. Because many games are not natively supported for the Linux kernel, various software has been made to run Windows games, such as Wine, Cedega, and Proton, and managers such as Lutris and PlayOnLinux. The Linux gaming community has a presence on the internet with users who attempt to run games that are normally not supported on Linux.
Ryan C. Gordon is a computer programmer and former Loki Software employee responsible for icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects as well as others. Gordon's site hosts projects with the code from such commercial games as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake III Arena and other free and open source projects for multiple platforms.
MonoDevelop was an open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET Framework. MonoDevelop integrates features similar to those of NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio, such as automatic code completion, source control, a graphical user interface (GUI) and Web designer. MonoDevelop integrates a Gtk# GUI designer called Stetic. It supports Boo, C, C++, C#, CIL, D, F#, Java, Oxygene, Vala, JavaScript, TypeScript and Visual Basic.NET. Although there is no word from the developers that is has been discontinued, nonetheless it hasn't been updated in 4 years and is no longer installable on major operating systems, such as Ubuntu 22.04 and above. Its parent Microsoft, seems to have shifted focus to Visual Studio Code and the .NET Framework, which runs on many operating systems, including Linux.
Overgrowth is an action video game released by Wolfire Games available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux. It was announced on September 17, 2008, and released on October 16, 2017, after 9 years of development and early access.
Machinarium is a puzzle point-and-click adventure game developed by Amanita Design. It was released on 16 October 2009 for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, on 8 September 2011 for iPad 2 on the App Store, on 21 November 2011 for BlackBerry PlayBook, on 10 May 2012 for Android, on 6 September 2012 on PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network in Europe, on 9 October 2012 in North America and on 18 October 2012 in Asia, and was also released for PlayStation Vita on 26 March 2013 in North America, on 1 May 2013 in Europe and on 7 May 2013 in Asia. Demos for Windows, Mac and Linux were made available on 30 September 2009. A future release for the Wii's WiiWare service was cancelled as of November 2011 due to WiiWare's 40MB limit.
Black Shades is a free and open-source video game developed by Wolfire Games. Originally released for Mac OS 9 it was ported to other platforms due to the source code availability. The player controls a psychic bodyguard who is tasked with protecting a VIP from a horde of zombies, snipers and other assorted would-be assassins.
Humble Bundle, Inc. is a digital storefront for video games, which grew out of its original offering of Humble Bundles, collections of games sold at a price determined by the purchaser and with a portion of the price going towards charity and the rest split between the game developers. Humble Bundle continues to offer these limited-time bundles, but have expanded to include a greater and more persistent storefront. The Humble Bundle concept was initially run by Wolfire Games in 2010, but by its second bundle, the Humble Bundle company was spun out to manage the promotion, payments, and distribution of the bundles. In October 2017, the company was acquired by Ziff Davis through its IGN Entertainment subsidiary.
Cogs is a puzzle video game released in 2009 by Lazy 8 Studios, originally released as a Microsoft Windows title, but receiving subsequent ports to other operating systems, mobile platforms, and game consoles. The game requires the player to manipulate a three-dimensional object's sides as sliding block puzzles as to complete specific goals, such as meshing gears to complete a clockwork mechanism or routing gas flow through pipes to a balloon.
Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole is a 2D platform video game developed by Curve Studios and published by Curve Digital. Its mechanics revolve around stealth, and the gameplay has been likened to that of Metal Gear Solid and Super Meat Boy. The player controls a goggle-wearing clone who must make his way through a testing facility filled with hazards and robot sentries by staying in the shadows, risking instant death if he is spotted by an enemy. The game was released on 4 November 2011 as Stealth Bastard as a free download for Microsoft Windows. An expanded version, Stealth Bastard Deluxe, was released for Windows via Steam the following November. It subsequently became available for OS X and Linux in April 2013 along with The Teleporter Chambers downloadable content released the previous month. In June 2013, it was released for Android as part of the Humble Bundle with Android 6, including DRM-free versions for Windows, Mac OS and Linux and its soundtrack. Versions for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita were also released in July 2013 under the name Stealth Inc: A Clone in the Dark. Curve have also announced plans to release the game for iPad and iPhone. In February 2014 a PlayStation 4 version of the game titled the Ultimate Edition was announced. It contains two DLC expansions The Teleporter Chambers and The Lost Clones and was released in March 2014. On 1 May 2014, a sequel, Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones, was announced for the Wii U. It was released on 30 October 2014. The Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Xbox One version was also announced. The sequel, Stealth Inc. 2, was released in April 2015 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.
Receiver is a first-person shooter video game developed by Wolfire Games. The game attempts to portray realistic gun mechanics through a unique reloading system, where each step of reloading is assigned a different button. The player scavenges items and audio tapes which reveal the story in a procedurally generated world.
Counter-Strike (CS) is a series of multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror while counter-terrorists try to prevent it. The series began on Windows in 1999 with the release of the first game, Counter-Strike. It was initially released as a modification ("mod") for Half-Life that was designed by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe before the rights to the mod's intellectual property were acquired by Valve, the developers of Half-Life, who then turned Counter-Strike into a retail product released in 2000.
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