Westwood Studios

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Westwood Studios

logo
legal form Electronic Arts subsidiary
founding 1985
resolution 2003 (merged with Dreamworks Interactive )
Seat Las Vegas , Nevada , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle
Website www.westwood.com ( Memento dated March 4, 2000 in the Internet Archive )

The Westwood Studios were one of Brett Sperry and Louis Castle based games development company from Las Vegas . Through Dune 2, Westwood is considered the founder of the genre of real-time strategy . The most famous work is the Command & Conquer series, which heralded the breakthrough for the real-time strategy genre on the mass market. Westwood was also responsible for a number of well-known computer role-playing games and adventure games .

Company history

Early years as Westwood Associates (1985–1992)

Westwood Associates logo

The company was founded in Las Vegas , Nevada in 1985 as a typical garage company, initially under the name Westwood Associates . In the early years, the young programmers made their first experiences with entertainment software by porting various game titles from 8 to 16 bit systems such as Commodore Amiga and Atari ST for the established companies Epyx and Strategic Simulations (SSI) .

After Westwood Associates had gathered funding and know-how through system porting , Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle ventured into their first game, Mars Saga - a commission for Electronic Arts . Mars Saga was released in 1988.

Other early projects included Battletech - The Crescent Hawk's Inception , Dragonstrike and Eye of the Beholder . The latter was Westwood's first major success. The game was released in 1990 and was a role-playing game based on the role-playing rules Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Edition) , which was distributed by Strategic Simulations. Westwood's other publishers also included Infocom and Disney .

Takeover by Virgin (1992–1998)

By 1992 Westwood Associates had become known for its first successes and high-quality commissioned work. However, the financing of their own projects proved to be more and more difficult. The development costs were already over a million US dollars at this point, for which Westwood, as an independent developer, received a maximum of 750,000 dollars from publishers and had to bear the risk for all further costs, and the trend is rising. Those interested in acquiring Westwood included Sierra Entertainment , but Sierra also demanded complete creative control over the direction of the studio and its projects. Instead, Sperry and Castle opted for a lower offer from the British publisher Virgin Interactive Entertainment , which guarantees them greater freedom. As a result, the company was renamed Westwood Studios . The contract gave Westwood the opportunity to market its self-developed computer games worldwide. In the same year Westwood published Fables & Fiends: The Legend of Kyrandia : Book One and Dune II - The Building of A Dynasty (in Europe: Dune II - Battle for Arrakis ), which is widely considered to be the first real-time strategy game as we know it today. It was based on the science fiction novel Dune - The Desert Planet by Frank Herbert .

In 1993 Westwood published the first part of their role-playing game trilogy Lands of Lore , which still has a large fan base and influenced later titles by other game developers.

The next, arguably the biggest step by Westwood Studios followed with the development of Command & Conquer: The Tiberium Conflict , which was released for PC in 1995. Command & Conquer , together with the competing product Warcraft , triggered the boom in real-time strategy games and significantly influenced subsequent computer games. Command & Conquer and its sequels remained the most famous and commercially successful products of Westwood Studios.

In 1997 the game designers at Westwood developed the adventure game Blade Runner for the film of the same name, which is still considered one of the best film adaptations to this day. In the same year, the Command & Conquer series broke the 10 million sales mark for the first time. Due to the enormous success of the series and the increasingly important Internet, Westwood added another C&C title ( Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor ) as an online game, which flopped due to playful inadequacies and therefore never appeared in Europe. From 1997 to the takeover by the US publisher Electronic Arts in the following year, Sperry also worked as President and CEO of Westwood as President of Worldwide Development for Virgin Interactive. The real-time strategy game Dune 2000 was released in 1998 as a new edition of Dune II - Fight for Arrakis for the PC and PlayStation.

Takeover by EA (1998-2003)

Westwood Studios' office

In 1998 Virgin Interactive suffered a few financial failures and had to sell its US division. Westwood Studios was therefore bought together with Virgin Interactive's development studio Burst in Irvine (California) by the US publisher Electronic Arts for 122.5 million US dollars in cash, Castle and Sperry each received a five-year contract. The price was considered very high - EA's 1997/98 annual profit was $ 72 million - and an expression of EA's great interest in Westwood. The Irvine studio was renamed Westwood Pacific and placed under the direction of Westwood Studios. However, many Westwood employees found the takeover to be an intolerable step, as it meant a strong influence by Electronic Arts on both the games they developed and the brand itself. A number of Westwood programmers, designers and other employees left the company.

In 1999, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun was released and broke EA's internal record for best-selling PC title, with more than 1.5 million copies sold in the first few months. However, many fans of the series were disappointed and blamed the acquisition of Westwood Studios by Electronic Arts for the poor quality.

After the release of Tiberian Sun , the studio began to consider further projects. Sperry saw great potential especially in the MMORPG sector and tried to open up this market for Westwood with Earth & Beyond . Castle, on the other hand, wanted to develop a pirate game. In addition, a team was working on a shooter in the C&C universe, which meant that the development capacities of the main studio were fully utilized. At the same time, the studio management feared that the studio in Irvine, whose best-known publication so far was the cartoon adventure Toonstruck , could face closure without a prestigious project. As a result, work already started on a continuation of Red Alert at the Tiberian Sun technical base has been turned over to Westwood Pacific, under the direction of Mark Skaggs and Dustin Browder . The result, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 , appeared 2000. It was also a commercial success and the reviews were much better than for Tiberian Sun .

In 2001 Westwood published the Emperor: Battle for Dune developed by Intelligent Games , which for the first time in the company's history used a 3D engine, the Westwood 3D engine (W3D), and was also used for the development of the C&C shooter. The further development of this engine for real-time strategy games was also passed on to Westwood Pacific. The SAGE engine emerged from this further development .

The C&C shooter Command & Conquer: Renegade was finally released in 2002, two years late and a total of five years in development . The success of Renegade was good, but could not convince. Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat , which appeared almost at the same time, remained meaningless. In September 2002, Earth & Beyond finally came onto the market, but could not hold its own. After six months, the game had just 20,000 to 25,000 subscribers, about a tenth of Origin Systems' in- house competitor Ultima Online . It was Westwood's final publication. A second Renegade , which was already in development, with the subtitle Battlegrounds in the Red Alert Universe was canceled in order not to create competition for Battlefield 1942 from EA's subsidiary DICE and to avoid the competition from Doom 3 expected for 2003 . For the development of the C&C -MMO Command & Conquer: Continuum , Westwood received no approval after the failure of Earth & Beyond and the development of a Command & Conquer 3 had not made it past an early prototype status to date.

When the Sage-Engine based title Command & Conquer: Generals of the sister studio in Irvine came on the market in February 2003 , it had already been renamed EA Pacific. In January 2003, Electronic Arts announced the end of Westwood in its annual report. Westwood Studios Las Vegas and EA Pacific were closed on March 31, 2003 and merged with EA's subsidiary Dreamworks Interactive to form EA Los Angeles . Despite takeover bids, many developers left the company, including numerous developers of the first C&C games and studio founder Sperry. His partner Castle, however, stayed. The employees ready to be taken over into the EA Studios developed the expansion Command & Conquer: Generals - The Zero Hour under the direction of Harvard Bonin and Mark Skaggs . Several of the original Westwood workforce started their own businesses, including Petroglyph Games , founded by Joe Bostic, Mike Legg, and Steve Tall . a. Westwood house composer Frank Klepacki also joined. Brett Sperry temporarily withdrew from the game industry until he founded Jet Set Games with Rade Stojsavljevic and Adam Isgreen in 2008.

Reasons for the decline

Customers often attribute the main blame for the company's decline to Publisher Electronic Arts, as well as the development studios Origin Systems and Bullfrog Productions, which were closed at the same time . Studio founder Castle contradicted this popular opinion in an interview on the occasion of a report by GameStar magazine in February 2014. According to him, Westwood had been given a lot of freedom for its own decisions and extensive financial support from the new parent company from the start:

“People always said EA forced this or that on us. We had a completely free hand. We just couldn't handle the abundance. […] So if someone out there says: EA broke this company because they suddenly only looked at the money and because they made them rules, that's completely wrong. In fact, it was the other way around: As a small company, we only looked at the money. Every single product had to make a profit. Under EA, however, it was said: Just create the best game you can create! As it turned out, that was downright fatal, at least for us. "

- Louis Castle

Among other things, the workforce was increased with numerous inexperienced employees, disregarding the previous minimum requirements, while the experienced employees were increasingly busy with the administration of the company. In addition, there were negligence in quality control. After the takeover, projects were planned to be significantly larger, which for example led to less interesting game functions being included in the development ( feature creep ). The studio also lacked a viable concept for further developing the product portfolio. Since the studio management in Las Vegas wanted to implement their own dream projects ( Earth & Beyond or Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat ), they neglected the further development of the actual premium brand Command & Conquer and gave it away. When Earth & Beyond , Pirates and the long overdue C&C spin-off Renegade did not meet sales expectations in 2002 , those in charge lacked correspondingly presentable projects to convince EA management to continue the studio. According to Castle, there has never been a better alternative to the takeover by EA. Without the EA offer, Westwood would probably have been sold to Microsoft , according to Castle , which would have increasingly lost interest in the traditionally PC-heavy real-time strategy genre with the introduction of the Xbox , as the example of Ensemble Studios and the Age of Empires series show.

Published games

As Westwood Associates

As Westwood Studios

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edge editorial team: Retrospective: The Making of ... Dune II ( English ) In: Edge magazine . Future Publishing. December 9, 2008. Archived from the original on January 16, 2013. Retrieved on March 29, 2011.
  2. ↑ a b c d e André Peschke: In the realm of evil . In: IDG (Ed.): GameStar . February 2014, pp. 94-101.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Michael Graf: The decline of C&C . In: IDG (Ed.): GameStar . March 2014, pp. 94-109.
  4. ↑ Las Vegas Review Journal ( Memento of the original from June 24, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (May 1, 1997). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.reviewjournal.com
  5. ↑ LinkedIn : Brett Sperry's profile
  6. ↑ Chris Morris: EA buys Westwood ( English ) In: CNN Money . Time Warner . August 17, 1998. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
  7. ↑ Rade Stojsavljevic: Postmortem: Westwood Studios' Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun ( English ) In: Gamasutra . UBM, plc . April 4, 2000. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
  8. ↑ Sam Parker: EA consolidates studios, closes Westwood ( English ) In: Gamespot . January 29, 2003. Retrieved March 28, 2014.