- published: 17 Dec 2015
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Crystal Dynamics is an American video game developer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and founded in 1992 by Judy Lang, Madaline Canepa and Dave Morris. It was acquired by Eidos Interactive, a British video game publisher, in 1998 and, following Square Enix's acquisition of Eidos in 2009, is now a subsidiary of Square Enix.
Crystal Dynamics was formed in mid-1992 by Sega veterans Judy Lang (sales and acting CEO), Madeline Canepa (marketing) and Dave Morse (Amiga). Crystal was the first licensed developer for 3DO, a gaming hardware platform simultaneously funded by Kleiner Perkins.
In 1993 Strauss Zelnick, then president of 20th Century Fox's film studio, was hired to run Crystal Dynamics. This made national news and helped to touch off the frenzy of multimedia investments of the mid-1990s.
3DO's launch during the 1993 Christmas season was a commercial failure, undermining Crystal's one-platform software strategy. Zelnick, Lange and Mark Cerny all resigned at about this time.
The next strategy was to become a leading publisher for two new 32-bit, 3D-capable consoles, the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn. Randy Komisar was hired away from LucasArts in 1994 to replace Zelnick as CEO. Crystal Dynamics expanded to a staff of 140, and shipped some of the world's first PlayStation and Saturn games for Christmas 1994. However, losses continued to mount.