First Person Shooter Family Tree

Delta Force Black Hawk Down - xbox

For this blog I am going to be looking at a first person shooter and looking at who developed it. I will be looking at their history and some of the people who founded the companies.

The game that I have decided to look at is Delta Force Black Hawk Down. Delta Force Black Hawk Down was developed by Novalogic and Climax Studios.

Black Hawk Down was released in 2003 and is a first person shooter that takes place in Somalia, where the famous Mogadishu operation took place. The game is based on the real events that were also depicted in a book and a movie. In the first half of the game the missions consist of the missions that the delta force soldiers had to engage in, such as defending UN food convoys, rescuing hostages or destroying weapon shipments. In the second part of the game, it covers the events of mission Irene on October 3rd 1993. Its goal was to capture two lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. For most of the missions you play as a member of a small delta force team, working in co-operation with US Army Rangers or Un Forces. Some of the missions include the player riding machine gunner on a Humvee or a helicopter.

Novalogic was founded in 1985 by John Garcia. Novalogic is a privately owned company. The Primary shareholder is Electronic Arts. Novalogic is a global publisher of computer games for the PC, Playstation, Playstation2, Nintendo Gamecube and xbox. It concentrates on a small number of titles each year. Novalogic spent it early years in producing home versions of popular arcade games. Throughout their history it has developed original gaming content for both console and PC platforms. Novalogic is best known for developing military combat simulations, with one of these franchises being the Delta Force Series. The Delta Force series includes:

Delta Force

Delta Force 2

Delta Force: Land Warrior

Delta Force: Urban Warfare

Delta Force: Task Force Dagger

Delta Force: Black Hawk Down

Delta Force: Black Hawk Down: Team Sabre

Delta Force: Xtreame

In 2004 Novalogic released Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising which dropped the Delta Force Name. Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising was Novalogics attempt to create a vehicular battleground. With its success in the consumer military simulation, Novalogic was brought to the attention of the US army. In 1999 Novalogic Systems was developed for the gaming market by bringing them to the military and civilian training communities. Novalogic Systems was the provider of the training software for the Land Warrior Soldier system.

John Garcia formed Novalogic in 1985. His computer software career started in southern California in the early 1980’s, when he worked for Datasoft as a programmer. He later became vice president of software development. He was responsible for 22 programmers and he helped develop more then 40 software titles. While at Novalogic he helped guide the company from small time arcade conversions to large scale development of best selling CD – ROM titles.

Climax was founded in 1987 by Karl Jeffery. It has grown into one of the world’s leading independent developers of interactive software. Climax is made up of four divisions which are: LA, Action, Racing and Handheld. They develop games for all the major consoles; Playstaion2, Nintendo Gamecube, xbox, and the Gameboy Advance. They also develop games for wireless devices and interactive television. Successful games that they have developed include:

MotoGP – xbox

Sudeki – xbox

ATV Offroad Fury 3 – Playstaion2

Karl Jeffery is the founder of climax and has been chief executive officer since then; he began as a freelance video games programmer, developing games for the Spectrum, Amstrad and Sega consoles for small UK publishers, which back then included Activision and Epyx. He would do everything from the design, the coding to the art, and a game would take him about four months to develop. He founded climax with several other programmers.