Digital Extremes London

Overview

London, Ontario-based Digital Extremes was founded in 1993 by James Schmalz, who previously worked at Epic MegaGames on Solar Winds. Digital Extremes' first game was Epic Pinball, published as shareware by Epic MegaGames.

Epic Pinball proved to be a huge success in the shareware market, warranting two spin-offs by Digital Extremes. Silverball, released later in 1993, was a commercial version of Epic Pinball with all-new tables. Extreme Pinball, released in 1995, was an all-new pinball game with brand-new features and a faster game engine.

All three of these games helped fund the development of Unreal, which started development in 1994 at Digital Extremes. Unreal was a first-person shooter that sported a true 3-D graphics engine, and spent four years in development limbo before it was finally released in 1998.

Unreal also proved to be a huge success in the gaming industry. The first three Unreal Tournament games and Unreal Championship were developed by Digital Extremes, but Epic MegaGames (who co-developed all of the Unreal games) has owned the rights to the Unreal franchise ever since.

Digital Extremes has moved away from the Unreal franchise to work on Dark Sector, a third-person stealth shooter currently scheduled to be released in the fall of 2007. In 2001, Digital Extremes formed a second studio in Toronto, Ontario to focus on developing console games. The new studio was named Brain Box Games, but this later became the name of a small division of the Toronto studio that focused on budget games. Since then, the Toronto studio was renamed to Digital Extremes Toronto, and the primary studio in London was renamed to Digital Extremes London.

The Toronto studio worked on their first-person shooter Pariah while the London studio was still working on Dark Sector. After Pariah finished development, the Toronto studio began working on Pariah: Shroud Wars. Unfortunately, since Pariah was a commercial flop, Shroud Wars was renamed WarPath and took on a new life as a whole new game. WarPath is currently scheduled to be released in June 2006.

In 2005, the London and Toronto studios merged so that they could both work together on WarPath and Dark Sector.

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