Housemarque Ltd.

Overview

The two founding members of the two Finnish game companies Bloodhouse Ltd. and Terramarque Ltd. established Housemarque Ltd. in early 1995. Both companies had developed games for Amiga before. As PC game markets really started to emerge after the collapse of Commodore (manufacturer of Amiga computers) in 1994, Housemarque was established in order to take advantage of the growing PC game markets. The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland.

Housemarque developed 3 PC CD-ROM titles (Super Stardust - 1996, Alien Incident - 1996 and The Reap - 1997) from 1995 to fiscal year end 1999. Although none of the games were commercial hits, all the games received very good reviews among the game press. Internationally distributed computer games were not the only products company was doing. Other activities includes the development of an on-line world called Con Quest, consulting for the Finnish National Lottery Company (Veikkaus) and some small "advertainment games" for several customers.

In early 1999, they signed a contract with Infogrames to develop Supreme Snowboarding (known as Boarder Zone in the US) for PC CD-ROM. Sights were set for the Christmas release. As the game had been in development well before signing a contract with Infogrames, their snowboarding game had already gained some reputation being one of the most visually stunning games around. For instance, 3DFX showed the game at their stand at E3 1998 in Atlanta. Also, Supreme Snowboarding was one of the few games that were presented in the official launch event of Pentium III processors February 1999 in San Jose. Intel also presented the game at Game Developers Conference in March.

After releasing TransWorld Snowboarding for the Xbox in 2002, as the sequel to Supreme Snowboarding, the company released the snowboarding game Floboarding for Nokia's N-Gage in 2003, and started development on the internal technology for a PS2 Title. In 2007 they released Super Stardust HD as a downloadable game for the Playstation 3.

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