Westwood Studios
Westwood Studios was an American video game developer based out of Las Vegas, Nevada. It was founded by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle in 1985 as Westwood Associates. The company had very humble beginnings, porting popular 8-bit games to 16-bit platforms like the Amiga and Atari ST and working as a ghost developer for various publishers. However, in 1992, they merged with Virgin Games, changed their name to Westwood Studios, and started being branded on game covers. Their quality of games improved significantly, and, using skills they learned from previous games Westwood created real-time strategy video game genre. In 1998, Electronic Arts bought Virgin Interactive and acquired Westwood and Burst Studios (which it renamed to Westwood Pacific). In 2003, EA merged Westwood Studios and Westwood Pacific into EA Los Angeles, closing both studios and retiring the brand.
Contents
Personal
The first Westwood game I ever played, although I was unaware of it at the time, was my cousin's BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge. This was also my very first experience with BattleTech, and, while I found the setting interesting, I found the game to be dull. Later, in 1994-ish, my friend Kevin got Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, which prominently displays the Westwood logo in the game's title sequence. We played this game quite a bit, and I was very impressed with the art, but we got stuck quite a ways into the game. Not too long after that, I got Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, also with phenomenal art, and I enjoyed it though never finished it. Around 1999, my girlfriend got The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One. It was again a gorgeous looking game, but we got stuck and didn't finish it (although I did many years later). I was fully aware of the popularity of the Command & Conquer series, but I never got into it, finding it to be a cheap ripoff of the Dune games. I have since played around with several other Westwood games, and own a handful. I have always been impressed by the company's artistic style, which produced work that was vastly superior to most other companies of the time, However, I've always found myself underwhelmed with the game play of their games. Nearly all of their games have bad controls or poor design which always put me off.
Games
Here are some of the games Westwood created that are important to me.
MS-DOS
Staff
These are people who worked at Westwood whose work I appreciate.
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