Coordinates | 33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N |
---|---|
Company name | Cryptic Studios |
Company logo | |
Foundation | 2000 |
Location | Los Gatos, California |
Key people | Jack Emmert, CEO; Stephen D'Angelo, CTO; Hindol Datta, CFO |
Industry | Computer gaming |
Products | ''City of Heroes'', ''City of Villains'', ''Champions Online'', ''Star Trek Online'', ''Neverwinter'' |
Num employees | 100–200 (2007) |
Parent | Independent (2000–2008)Atari (2008–2011)Perfect World (2011-Present) |
Homepage | http://www.crypticstudios.com |
Footnotes | }} |
Cryptic Studios, a wholly owned Perfect World subsidiary, is a small American massively multiplayer online role-playing game developer headquartered in Los Gatos, California.
"Rick and I wanted to do an online role-playing game," Lewis told the ''Los Gatos Weekly Times'' in January 2007. "We'd been role-playing gamers growing up, and thought that online would be a great way to continue that experience, while overcoming the distances involved. We decided that there were too many fantasy games in development—this was 1999, so we discussed many alternatives. Superheroes quickly rose to the top of the list. It is something people could understand and identify with quickly, versus ideas like science fiction or horror, because it provides an infinite background on which to create adventures of all kinds. And who doesn't want to have super powers?"
At a New Year's party in 1999, Lewis and Dakan met Bruce Rogers, Matt Harvey and Cameron Petty, veterans of Atari's Coin Operated Games division who had begun trying to found a computer game company but lacked funding.
In 2000, Lewis sold his company, Stellar Semiconductor, Inc., to Broadcom Corporation. With Lewis' funding and Rogers' expertise, the group formed Cryptic Studios. Role-playing game writer Jack Emmert joined the team to work on game design.
right|thumb|Cryptic Studios logo, 2000–2007In March 2007, Cryptic Studios moved to a larger corporate headquarters in Los Gatos, California. Plans for the new headquarters include adding a state-of-the-art sound studio to be built by the Walters-Storyk Design Group. At that time the company also adopted a new corporate logo. Cryptic Studios now employs more than 100 full-time employees.
On December 9, 2008, Atari SA announced that it had acquired Cryptic Studios.
On March 2010, Bill Roper was promoted to Chief Creative Officer, succeeding Emmert (who became the Chief Operations Officer), but left the studio in August that same year.
On March 2011, Jack Emmert was promoted to Chief Executive Officer when John Needham left to peruse other opportunities in the gaming industry.
On May 17, 2011, Atari announced it is looking to sell off Cryptic Studios.
On May 31, 2011 it was announced that Perfect World had acquired Cryptic Studios.
Cryptic Studios' first MMORPG, ''City of Heroes'', was launched on April 28, 2004. On October 31, 2005, it launched ''City of Villains'', a separate game that was linked with ''City of Heroes'' through player versus player combat zones.
, Cryptic Studios had released ten free expansions for ''City of Heroes'' and ''City of Villains''.
On November 6, 2007, Cryptic announced that it had sold the ''City of Heroes''/''City of Villains'' intellectual property to NCSoft. All of the ''City of Heroes''/''City of Villains'' development team transitioned to work under NCSoft under the working title NCNorCal (NCNC), which later became the NCSoft-owned subsidiary, Paragon Studios.
Cryptic Studios released ''Champions Online'', loosely based on a superhero-based role-playing game, on September 1, 2009. Cryptic Studios had announced this title on February 14, 2008. It has, of February 2011, implemented a free-to-play model with optional micropayment transactions generating revenue, in addition to its traditional subscription system.
Star Trek Online was officially launched on February 2, 2010. The game resembles an action-oriented MMORPG, with combat and features divided between Space environments and Ground environments during play.
Cryptic Studios' Web site contains several images of concept art from one or more additional games currently in development. One of these games is ''Neverwinter'', new CORPG game.
Category:Companies established in 2000 Category:City of Heroes Category:Video game companies of the United States Category:Video game developers Category:Companies based in Silicon Valley
ca:Cryptic Studios de:Cryptic Studios es:Cryptic StudiosThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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