Blizzard Entertainment was founded by Michael Morhaime, Ayman Allen Adham and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse in February 1991, a year after all three had received their bachelor’s degrees from UCLA. In the early days the company focused on creating game ports for other studios. Ports include titles such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I and Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess. In 1993, the company developed games like Rock N’ Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under $10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.

Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired along with Sierra On-Line by a company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant’s stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, Sierra On-line which included Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard was part of the Vivendi Games group of Vivendi. In July 2008 Vivendi Games merged with Activision, using Blizzard’s name in the resulting company, Activision Blizzard.

In 1996, Blizzard acquired Condor Games, which had been working on the game Diablo for Blizzard at the time. Condor was renamed Blizzard North, and has since developed hit games Diablo, Diablo II, and its expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Blizzard North was located in San Mateo, California.

Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January 1997 with the release of their action-RPG Diablo. In 2002, Blizzard was able to reacquire rights for three of its earlier Silicon & Synapse titles from Interplay Entertainment and re-release them under Game Boy Advance. In 2004, Blizzard opened European offices in the Paris suburb of Vélizy, Yvelines, France, responsible for the European in-game support of World of Warcraft. On November 23, 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, its MMORPG offering. On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the acquisition of Swingin’ Ape Studios, a console game developer which had been developing StarCraft: Ghost. The company was then merged into Blizzard’s other teams after StarCraft: Ghost was ‘postponed indefinitely’. On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters at 131 Theory in UC Irvine’s University Research Park in Irvine, California.

In 2008, Blizzard was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for the creation of World of Warcraft. Mike Morhaime accepted the award.

Company Information

• Founded 1991 (as Silicon & Synapse)
• Headquarters Irvine, California, USA.
• Key people Michael Morhaime (president and co-founder
• Frank Pearce (vice president and co-founder)
• Rob Pardo (vice president)
• Chris Metzen (vice president of Creative Development)
• Industry Computer and video game industry
• Products The Warcraft series
• The StarCraft series
• The Diablo series
• Revenue $1.1 Billion
• Employees 2,700
• Parent Flag of France Vivendi
• Website www.blizzard.com

Firaxis has produced several games, including Gettysburg and Antietam, based on their namesake famous American Civil War battles, and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, a space colonization game taking place in the Alpha Centauri star system. In early 2000, co-founder Brian Reynolds parted with Firaxis to form his new studio, Big Huge Games. Firaxis Games then went on to release Sid Meier’s SimGolf, a golf course building/management game. Perhaps their most popular releases have been Civilization III, and later Civilization IV, sequels to Meier’s original Civilization game.

In November 2004, Firaxis released Sid Meier’s Pirates!, an update of Meier’s classic 1987 computer game of the same name. An Xbox version of the game was released in July, 2005, and a PSP version (developed by Full Fat) was released in January 2007.

Civilization IV started production in late 2003 and was released on October 24, 2005 in the United States, and was released on November 4, 2005 in Europe.

Civilization Revolution, a console-only version of their popular Civilization series, was released in July of 2008.

On November 7, 2005, Take-Two Interactive announced that it was acquiring Firaxis. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but according to the SEC filing it amounted for USD$26.7 million in cash, stock, and development advances, with almost $11.3 million of that figure coming in the form of possible considerations based on future product sales. The company was consolidated with PopTop Software in March 2006, the resultant combined studio to be headed up by Sid Meier. Jeff Briggs assumed the role of Chairman in April 2006 and left the company completely in November.

In April 2007 it was announced that Soren Johnson left the company and joined Electronic Arts to work on Spore with Lead Designer Will Wright. Johnson was formerly a key person for Firaxis, acting as Co-Designer for Civilization III, and later Lead Designer on Civilization IV.

• Founded Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States (1996)
• Headquarters Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States
• Key people Sid Meier, Co-founder, Director of Creative Development
• Jeff Briggs, Co-founder and former CEO
• Industry Video games
• Products Sid Meier’s Civilization IV
• Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!
• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
• Sid Meier’s SimGolf
• Sid Meier’s Pirates!
• Employees Around 85
• Website Firaxis.com

Firaxis Games – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Take-Two has developed and published many notable games, including the Grand Theft Auto series, the Midnight Club racing series, controversial games Manhunt and Manhunt 2 and most recently BioShock. It owns 2K Games, formerly Visual Concepts prior to its purchase from Sega, and publishes its popular 2K Sports titles. It also acted as the publisher of Bethesda Softwork’s 2006 game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Take-Two is the target of a hostile takeover bid from rival Electronic Arts issued in February 2008. The bid expired August 18, 2008, and, according to Take-Two, will not be renewed. However, according to CNET, the two companies entered into confidential discussions on August 25, 2008.

Company history

In February 1999, Take-Two published the game Biosys under the company Jumpstart Interactive, a point-and-click adventure which follows the protagonist Professor Alan Russell and is set inside the fictional ecological facility Biosphere Four.

In 2004 Take-Two formed two new publishing companies called 2K Games and 2K Sports in order to manage a group of newly acquired development studios as well as publishing deals with a variety of other well known studios. Take-Two acquired the rights to the ESPN 2K sports games (When EA announced the ESPN deal, they dropped “ESPN” from their games), created by Visual Concepts (football and basketball) and Kush Games (baseball and hockey), from Sega as part of the creation of 2K Sports. In the same year, Take-Two bought the rights to the Civilization game from Infogrames for $22.3 million.

In 2005, Take-Two embarked on acquisition spree and spent more than $80 million buying game developers. It bought for $32 million the development studios Visual Concepts and Kush Games, for $11.4 million Gaia Capital Group and for around $11.8 million the studio Irrational Games, which develops Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. Then late that year in November, Take-Two acquired Firaxis for $27 million including possible performance bonuses.

At the annual meeting on March 29, 2007, Take-Two investors ousted five of six board members, including the chief executive, Paul Eibeler, who was replaced by Ben Feder.

Ryan Brant, former chief executive of Take-Two Interactive Software, pleaded guilty in February 2007 to falsifying business records. He faced up to four years in prison but received a lighter sentence in a plea agreement after agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors because he took it.

In 2005, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a lawsuit that Brant, with the company’s former chief financial officers, Larry Muller and James David Jr., and its head of sales, Robert Blau, inflated revenue in fiscal years 2000 and 2001.

In June the UFC filed a lawsuit against the company over the video game they created for the organization.

On May 22, 2007 Oasys Mobile signed a deal to bring several of the Sid Meier licenses to the mobile market. The original Sid Meier games are developed by Take-Two’s company Firaxis Games. Oasys will be bringing these games to the mobile market some time in 2008.

In March 2007 Take-Two filed a lawsuit against Jack Thompson, to prevent him from filing a public nuisance complaint in Florida court like he did with Bully.

Rival game company Electronic Arts revealed they had made a $25 p/share all cash transaction offer to the board of Take-Two in mid February 2008, subsequently revising it to $26 p/share after being rejected and making the offer known to the public. Rumors of a buyout had been floating around the internet several weeks prior. Stocks went up by 54% on Monday, following the Sunday announcement, closing over the $26 offer price, whilst EA’s own stock prices went down by 5%, the largest loss in over a year.

• Founded 1993
• Headquarters Flag of the United States New York, New York, USA
• Key people Ben Feder (CEO, President)
• Strauss Zelnick (Chairman)
• Industry Computer and video game
• Products video games
• Revenue 539.8 million USD (Q1 2008)
• Employees 2,002 (2007)
• Website www.take2games.com

Take-Two Interactive – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

EA later grew via acquisition of several successful developers. By the early 2000s, EA had become one of the world’s largest third-party publishers. In 2007 EA ranked 8th on the list of largest software companies in the world. In May 2008, the company reported net annual revenue of US$4.02 billion in fiscal year 2008. Currently, EA’s most successful products are sports games published under its EA Sports label, games based on popular movie licenses and games from long-running franchises like Road Rash, Need for Speed, Medal of Honor, The Sims, Battlefield and the later games in the Burnout and Command & Conquer series.

• Key people  John Riccitiello, CEO
• Frank Gibeau, President, EA Games Label
• Peter Moore, President, EA SPORTS
• Kathy Vrabeck, President, EA Casual Entertainment
• Nancy Smith, President, The Sims Label
• Larry Probst, chairman of the board and former CEO (1991-2007)
• Trip Hawkins, founder and former CEO (1982-1991)
• Industry  Interactive entertainment
• Revenue  ▲$4.02 billion USD (2008)
• Net income  ▲$339 million USD (2008)
• Employees  7,900 (2007)
• Website  www.ea.com

Electronic Arts – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia