Ketsujin Russian Studio

Ketsujin Russian Studio was a Russian outsource development studio founded by Mark Vange in the Fall of 2003. It was located in St. Petersburg and the operations were led by Anatoly Levin. The roots date back much further to Gemsoft (originally called Plain And Simple Systems) that Vange founded in 1991. It was a Russian studio that published games and it also set up development operations in the area. One of those was the development studio BST-Soft, responsible for the MMOG Air Attack and the the first two versions of Fighter Ace when Microsoft bought the rights for the United States and Canada, and renamed it. Gemsoft (and BST-Soft) were eventually acquired by VR1 until VR1 as a whole was sold in 2001.

When Ketsujin was founded two years in 2003, Vange largely reacquired The Russian division of VR1 from Jaleco Entertainment, Inc.. In 2005 he also founded the Canadian division Ketsujin Studios, but the Russian studio always remained the core team. Jaleco remained to have close ties to the studio, especially because it was formed as a merger between VR1 Entertainment, Inc. and Jaleco USA, Inc. in 2002. Ketsujin Russian Studio for instance did most of the development work on Jaleco's Xbox racing game Pulse Racer.

For Jaleco the team also did most of the work on the PC game Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002), drawing on the experience of the developers of earlier versions done by the former BST-Soft. On 16th February 2005 Vange and Ketsujin acquired the Fighter Ace franchise from Jaleco and continued to run the service until the servers were shut down on 1st August 2010.