Silicon Knights

Silicon Knights was a Canadian video game developer. Founded in 1992 by Denis Dyack, the company was headquartered in St. Catharines, Ontario. In 2012, following the loss of a court case against Epic Games, Dyack left Silicon Knights to form a new game studio, Precursor Games. The case then led Silicon Knights to multiple lawsuits that led the company to bankruptcy on May 16, 2014.

Games

Released

Silicon Knights' first games were real-time strategy/action hybrids for the computers. Silicon Knights' last PC game, Dark Legions was published in 1994. Since that time, Silicon Knights has moved from creating PC games to console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original PlayStation. In 2000, Silicon Knights was signed by Nintendo to create games exclusively for its consoles, during which time it produced Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. In 2004, the company ended exclusivity with Nintendo. In 2005, it partnered with publisher Microsoft Game Studios for the Too Human trilogy, though Nintendo still owned stock in the company. In 2008, the company released Too Human, which was published by Microsoft for the Xbox 360. The final game developed by the company, X-Men: Destiny, was released in September, 2011 for multiple console platforms.

Too Human

Too Human is an action role-playing game developed by Canadian developer Silicon Knights and published by Microsoft Studios for the Xbox 360 in 2008. The game is noted for having remained in development hell for almost ten years, originally planned for release on the Sony PlayStation in 1999. Development later went into the Nintendo GameCube in 2000 before eventually selling the rights to Microsoft in 2005.

Originally planned as a part of a game trilogy, the story is a science-fictional futuristic retelling of Norse mythology that portrays the Æsir, the Norse gods, as cybernetically enhanced humans, tasked with protecting mankind from the onslaught of Loki's army of machines. The player takes the role of the Norse god Baldur, who is less cybernetic than the other gods, thus being "too human".

Gameplay

Knight

A knight (/naɪt/) is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a monarch or other political leader for service to the Monarch or country, especially in a military capacity. Historically, in Europe, knighthood has been conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior. Often, a knight was a vassal who served as a fighter for a lord, with payment in the form of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on horseback. Since the early modern period, the title of knight is purely honorific, usually bestowed by a monarch, as in the British honours system, often for non-military service to the country. The modern female equivalent is Dame.

Denis Dyack

Denis Dyack (born July 14, 1966) is the former president of Canada-based video game developer Silicon Knights, and is a video game designer, writer, director and producer. Dyack directed the production of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and was inducted into the Canadian Gaming Hall of Fame by the Canadian Game Development Talent Awards in November 2011.

Biography

Denis Dyack graduated with a Bachelor of Physical Education Degree from Brock University, a H.BSc in Computer Science from Brock University and a Master of Science (Computer Science) from the University of Guelph. Dyack cofounded Silicon Knights in 1992 and the company's early games were developed for DOS, Atari ST and Amiga computers, transitioning to console development in 1996 with Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original PlayStation.

In 1998, Silicon Knights partnered as a second party with Nintendo to develop Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for the Nintendo 64 console. The game was upgraded to become one of the earlier titles to release on the Nintendo Gamecube. A subsequent partnership between Nintendo, Konami and Silicon Knights led to the Gamecube release of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

Unreal Engine

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs, and other RPGs. With its code written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today.

The current release is Unreal Engine 4, designed for Microsoft's DirectX 11 and 12 (for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Windows RT); OpenGL (for OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, iOS, Android, Ouya and Windows XP); and JavaScript/WebGL (for HTML5 Web browsers).

History

Unreal Engine 1

Making its debut in 1998 with Unreal, the first generation Unreal Engine integrated rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking, scripting, and file system management into one complete engine. Unreal Engine 1 provided an advanced software rasterizer and a hardware-accelerated rendering path using the Glide API, specifically developed for 3dfx GPUs, and was updated for OpenGL and Direct3D. The release of Unreal Tournament marked great strides in both network performance and Direct3D and OpenGL support.