Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Who created Nihilistic Software?
Nihilistic was founded in March 1998 by Ray Gresko, Robert Huebner, and Steve Tietze. Gresko and Huebner had formerly worked at LucasArts, and Tietze had worked at Rogue Entertainment. Many of Nihilistic's employees were drawn from LucasArts, working on games such as "".
Daydream Software is a defunct Swedish video game developer founded in 1994. They released four games (with another in the works) before closing in 2003.
Enlight Software is a developer and publisher of video games. The company was founded by Trevor Chan in 1993, and their first project was the economic strategy game "Capitalism", which was published by Interactive Magic in 1995. In 1997, they released "Capitalism Plus" (an updated version of "Capitalism") and the real-time strategy game "Seven Kingdoms". Later games include "Virtual U", "Capitalism II", "", "", "Restaurant Empire", "Zoo Empire", "Marine Park Empire" and "Restaurant Empire II".
Raven Software is an American video game developer based in Madison, Wisconsin. It was founded in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel after getting a publishing deal for their first game, "Black Crypt" (1992). During that game's development, the company formed a relationship with id Software, which was briefly located on the same street. Raven spent the next few years working primarily on PC games in partnership with id, making "ShadowCaster" (1993) with a game engine by id Software and three games in the "Heretic" series between 1994–1997 with id as the publisher and id Software employees as the producers. In 1997, Raven made an exclusive publishing deal with Activision, and the Raffel brothers subsequently sold the company to Activision. Several employees left the company then to form Human Head Studios.
Hugues Giboire, art director of previous Ninja Theory game "Heavenly Sword", returned to work on the game. A Microsoft Windows version of the game was announced on January 9, 2015. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4, and was made by Ninja Theory with a team of around twenty developers. Its subtitle, "Senua's Sacrifice", was announced in March 2016. "Hellblade: Senua's Psychosis", a short documentary film included with the game, details the concept behind its story and inspirations, notably the team's study of mental illness. It was written and narrated by Antoniades, and edited by Juergens.
Daydream Software was put through liquidation in February 2003 before closing in 2004. Most employees moving on to form a new development company: Resolution Interactive, which focused on iPhone games. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Silas Warner, an American programmer and an employee of software company Muse Software, was a pioneer of early video game development, especially the stealth genre. He had access to computers in college, and when he worked for the IBM Mainframe architectures before joining Muse Software. The computer he used for game-development, P.L.A.T.O., was one of the firsts with multiple functioning terminals and an example of early computer networks. Warner developed, with P.L.A.T.O., a series of classic video games like his flight simulator and arcade shooter. Inspired by the arcade shooter video game "Berzerk" and the 1961 war film "Guns of Navarone", he developed "Castle Wolfenstein", a stealth-adventure video game in which the player controls an unnamed American prisoner of war as he steals German files containing secret war plans, while avoiding, disarming or at times killing hostile guards and trying to escape the fortified Nazi stronghold 'Castle Wolfenstein', set in World War II. The game was published in 1981 by Warner's company M.U.S.E. Inc. (Muse Software).
In 1983, Nolan Bushnell founded a new computer-guided animation studio called Kadabrascope as a subsidiary of his Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres company (PTT), which was founded in 1977. Only one major project was made out of the new studio, an animated Christmas movie for NBC starring Chuck E. Cheese and other PTT mascots. The animation movement would be made using tweening instead of traditional cel animation. After the North American Video Game Crash of 1983, Bushnell started selling some subsidiaries of PTT to keep the business afloat. Sente Technologies (another division, was founded to have games distributed in PTT stores) was sold to Bally Games and Kadabrascope was sold to Lucasfilm. The Kadabrascope assets were combined with the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs' first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT. PTT would later go bankrupt in 1985 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.
Three video games were released based on the manga and the film. All three of the titles were developed by Technopolis Soft and published by Technopolis Soft and Tokuma Shoten. "Nausicaä in the Nick of Time" also known as "Nausicaä's Close Call" ("Naushika Kiki Ippatsu" or "Nausicaä Kiki Ippatsu") is a Japanese shoot 'em up video game developed and published by Technopolis Soft for the NEC PC-6001 computer system in 1984. The game marketed as "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" and known by its title screen as , is an adventure game developed by Technopolis Soft for the NEC PC-8801: it was released in the 1980s, most likely 1984. The third game, for the MSX is the most well-known of the releases and has been frequently and erroneously referred to as a game where the player kills the Ohmu. These games signaled the end of video game adaptations for Hayao Miyzaki's films. The only other games based on Miyazaki films were the LaserDisc arcade game "Cliff Hanger" and the MSX2 platform-adventure game "Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro", both of which were based on "The Castle of Cagliostro". Luke Plunkett describes these "two awful adaptations" as the reason Miyazaki does not allow further video game adaptations of his films.
Silicon Knights was a Canadian video game developer. Founded in 1992 by Denis Dyack, the company was headquartered in St. Catharines, Ontario. Their games included ones for computers in their early stages, and after 1996, they moved to console titles. Dyack left Silicon Knights to form a new game studio, Precursor Games, after the loss of a court case against Epic Games over the game engine Unreal Engine 3. Epic Games won the case and a counter-suit for $4.45 million on grounds of copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract. Following the case, Silicon Knights filed for bankruptcy on May 16, 2014.
When Silicon Knights began work on "Eternal Darkness", their intention was to create a game "that was in the horror genre, but not categorized as survival/horror", with then later labeling it as a "psychological thriller" during an early interview with IGN, as opposed to, what they referred to as, the "B-movie horror plots" of "Resident Evil". At the same time, Denis Dyack remarked during an interview about his decision to design the game with the intention of "messing with people's heads", after being inspired by media reports. The game was initially planned for the Nintendo 64 and to feature several characters, including "a Special Forces commando deep behind enemy lines", with the developers showing off the early builds during the 1999 E3 Expo; Silicon Knights later changed their mind and rebuilt the game in order to make it a launch title for the Nintendo GameCube. It never made it as a launch title, as development was delayed.
The failure of "Razor", and questions from Garland about why the gaming development scene did not have many independent projects similar to the independent film industry prompted the team to begin to evaluate the idea of "independent AAA", where the team would own the intellectual property and publish the game themselves without mainstream game publishers. The game would still have high production values but would be sold at a lower price. The team firmly believed that there was "a middle ground between the low budget pure indie development and AAA [projects]". The team opted not to use Kickstarter having decided to fund it themselves. This led to the creation of "", which had a team of only 15 people working on it. Since the game had a small budget, the studio did not promote the game heavily with advertisements instead creating numerous developer diaries for players who were interested in it. The team collaborated with several technology companies like 3Lacteal, Cubic Motion and Xsens to help with motion capture, which allowed the actors to preview their performance while acting. In September 2016, Ninja Theory announced their Senua Studio division, which would work on real-time virtual character technology. As the game explored mental illness and psychosis, the company consulted professional neuroscientists and obtained financial backing from the Wellcome Trust. After a three-year development cycle "Hellblade" was a critical success when it launched in August 2017, with praise for its depiction of mental illnesses. The game was also a commercial success, becoming profitable within three months of its release, generating more than $13 million with sales of more than 500,000 units. The game was nominated for five awards at the 14th British Academy Games Awards. Antoniades considered the critical acclaim validation that the independent AAA business model worked.
Vulcan was sold by SCDP Systems. The founders needed to change the name of the software, because Harris Corporation already had an operating system called Vulcan. Hal Pawluk, who worked for their advertising agency, suggested "dBASE", including the CamelCase. He also suggested that the first release of the product "II" would imply that it was already in its second version, and therefore would be perceived as being more reliable than a first release. The original manual was too complex from Pawluk's perspective, so he wrote a second manual, which was duly included in the package along with the first. Pawluk created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional Ashton surname, purportedly because it was felt that "Ashton-Tate" sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than "Lashlee-Tate". In reality, George Edwin Tate did not have a pet parrot named Ashton, until after Hal Pawluk named the company. Because people kept calling the company asking to speak to Mr Ashton, this hidden tidbit of information became a PC industry insider joke.
Silent Hill is a survival horror video game for the PlayStation published by Konami and developed by Team Silent, a group in Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. The first installment in the "Silent Hill" series, the game was released in North America in January 1999, and in Japan and Europe later that year. "Silent Hill" uses a third-person view, with real-time rendering of 3D environments. To mitigate limitations of the console hardware, developers liberally used fog and darkness to muddle the graphics. Unlike earlier survival horror games that focused on protagonists with combat training, the player character of "Silent Hill" is an "everyman".
Excalibur BBS was a Windows-based GUI BBS Client / Server software, developed by Excalibur Communications. Excalibur was released in 1993, and it has not been officially supported since 1999, when Excalibur Communications ceased operations.
Nickelodeon Creative Labs was founded in 1994 by Amy Friedman. The company produced motion graphics and short-form material for the Nickelodeon network, including the award-winning "Short Films by Short People" interstitial series. In 1996, Nickelodeon Creative Labs began producing the Nick Jr. series "Blue's Clues" in-house using Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Power Macintosh computers. In October 1999, Nickelodeon Creative Labs relaunched as Nick Digital; it was now also producing "Little Bill", another Nick Jr. series. In December 2008, MTV Networks planned to shut down Nick Digital by the end of the year. The company ultimately stayed open, but a Nick Digital branch at Nickelodeon Animation Studio took over producing visual effects for Nickelodeon's animated series. In 2009, Nickelodeon launched Nickelodeon Creative Advertising, a creative agency which produces advertising for kids and families.
Development of "Cortex Strikes Back" began in October 1996. For the game, Andy Gavin created a new engine and scripting language named "Game Oriented Object LISP 2" (GOOL 2) that was three times faster than the previous game's engine, could handle ten times the animation frames and twice the polygon count. The jungle levels were originally to have featured ground fog, but this was abandoned when magazines and the public began to heavily criticize other developers for using fog to hide polygon count. Sunlight and depth accentuation was experimented with for these levels. Wanting to have some "dirty" locations in the game, Naughty Dog worked in the sewer levels and added color contrast to the levels to show depth and break up the repetitive monotony of the endless sewer pipes. A flat plane z-buffer was created for the game; because the water surfaces and mud in the jungle had to be a flat plane and be exactly flat on the Y-axis, there could be no waves and the subdividing plane could not be at an odd angle. The effect only worked on objects in the foreground and was only used on Crash, some enemies and a few boxes at the same time. The soundtrack of "Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back" was provided by Mutato Muzika (consisting of Mark Mothersbaugh and Josh Mancell), while the sound effects were created by Universal Sound Studios (consisting of Mike Gollom, Ron Horwitz and Kevin Spears). The characters were designed by Charles Zembillas of American Exitus, Incorporated. Clancy Brown provided the voice of Doctor Neo Cortex, while Brendan O'Brien voiced the dual role of Doctor N. Gin and Doctor Nitrus Brio and Vicki Winters voiced Coco Bandicoot. The game was unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta, Georgia in June 1997 to a positive response from the game industry. The game went into the alpha stage in August 1997. Around that time, Dan Arey, the lead designer of "", joined Naughty Dog and streamlined the level design.
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
"Nefarious" was written, directed, produced, and narrated by Benjamin Nolot, founder and president of Exodus Cry. Exodus Cry, which distributed the film, is headquartered in Grandview, Missouri and is an organization that opposes human trafficking by raising awareness, by reintegrating victims back into society, and by prayer. Nolot founded Exodus Cry in 2007 after a woman he did not know gave him , saying that God told her to do so in order that Nolot might found an anti-human-trafficking organization. This was founded at a prayer meeting later that year where attendees prayed for human trafficking victims. The organization claims that this prayer meeting occurred on the day before the announcement of the 2007 international child pornography investigation, which involved approximately 2,400 human-trafficking-related arrests in 77 countries.
Shortly after the partnership with Microsoft, Silicon Knights announced that "Too Human", a game originally conceived for the Sony PlayStation, would be coming to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console as a planned trilogy. The game, dramatically reworked from the original concept, married the ideas of Norse mythology with high technology. The company was subject to a successful countersuit from Epic Games in May 2012 over the development of games using Epic's Unreal Engine 3, and the latter was awarded US $4.45 million in damages. Silicon Knights was also ordered to destroy all copies of existing titles using the engine, as well as in-development games "The Sandman", "Siren in the Maelstrom" and "The Box/Rytualist".
Pixar got its start in 1974 when New York Institute of Technology's (NYIT) founder Alexander Schure, who was also the owner of a traditional animation studio, established the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL), recruited computer scientists who shared his ambitions about creating the world's first computer-animated film. Edwin Catmull and Malcolm Blanchard were the first to be hired and were soon joined by Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco some months later, which were the four original members of the Computer Graphics Lab. Schure kept pouring money into the computer graphics lab, an estimated $15 million, giving the group everything they desired and driving NYIT into serious financial troubles. Eventually, the group realized they needed to work in a real film studio in order to reach their goal. Francis Ford Coppola then invited Smith to his house for a three-day media conference, where Coppola and George Lucas shared their visions for the future of digital moviemaking.
And when Lucas approached them and offered them a job at his studio, six employees decided to move over to Lucasfilm. During the following months, they gradually resigned from CGL, found temporary jobs for about a year to avoid making Schure suspicious, before they joined The Graphics Group at Lucasfilm.
In "Conan", the hero is on a quest to recover his lost armor and defeat an evil wizard. The game takes place in the world of Hyboria, a creation of Robert E. Howard for his stories about Conan the Barbarian. "Conan"s developer, Nihilistic Software, chose several Hyborian locations, such as Kush, Stygia, and the Barachan Isles, to establish a link to the literary world. Hyboria was designed to be a fantasy version of Earth around , and its civilizations were based on those from the Stone to Iron Ages. Nihilistic portrayed the plains of Kush, a fictional Africa, as savannahs with villages of straw huts. Stygia was illustrated as a land filled with structures resembling Egyptian tombs and the Barachan Isles as lushly jungled islands.
Nihilistic Software and Disney Interactive Studios was supposed to develop a video game based on the film for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii when Disney was still involved in the project. But when Fox took over the production, Nihilistic sought out negotiations with Fox Digital Entertainment division. They failed to agree on a settlement, which resulted in the cancellation of the video game. Fox Digital Entertainment later collaborated with Gameloft to produce a mobile game for iPhone and iPod Touch which was released on November 18, 2010.
The critics had mixed opinions about three prominent features of the game: voice acting, artwork, and faithfulness to Howard's writings. Perlman earned acclaim for his vocal performance and gravely voice that matched the game's dialogue, but he also received criticism for not sounding like a barbarian. A few applauded Nihilistic for capturing the oil painting feel of Frazetta's art, but several others said that the graphics consisted of drab-looking environments that were jagged-edged and pixelated when zoomed in. Although the animations were rated to be smooth and vivid, the lack of variety among enemy character models was criticized. Several critics also praised Nihilistic for recreating the atmosphere of Howard's stories. The decision to have Conan use magic was, however, called a "blasphemy" by IGN. G4 Canada disagreed and forgave the game on the grounds that it was mostly faithful to the books. Ray Huling of "The Escapist" said that the game's developers misunderstood Conan's appeal to the masses. In the journalist's opinion, Howard's depiction of Conan's brutal physical nature called attention to the dull nature of their lives and offered them a temporary escape. Furthermore, Huling said that Nihilistic used the characteristics of Conan for superficial purposes, and that, in copying the mechanics of another game without any groundbreaking innovations of its own, Nihilistic missed the essence of Howard's stories and created a shell of what its game could have been.
StarCraft: Ghost is an unreleased military science fiction stealth-action video game previously under development by Blizzard Entertainment. Part of Blizzard's "StarCraft" series, the game was announced on September 20, 2002, and was to be developed by Nihilistic Software for the Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 video game consoles. Several delays in development caused Blizzard to move back the release date and the game has not yet materialized. Nihilistic Software ceded development to Swingin' Ape Studios in 2004 before Blizzard bought the company, and plans for the GameCube version were cancelled in 2005.