Westwood Studios

History

Brett Sperry and Louis Castle met in Las Vegas in late 1983 and in 1985 went into business together as Brelous Software — a blend of their first names — before renaming the company Westwood Associates. Their first work was unglamorous but formative: converting games between computers, from 8-bit machines to the new 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST, for publishers such as Strategic Simulations, Inc. That porting work taught the small team how to make graphics and interfaces feel smooth on each machine, and it led to original commissions. Westwood's first original title was Mars Saga (1988), and it built BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception for Infocom the same year.

For SSI, which held the TSR computer license for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Westwood made the action-adventure Hillsfar (1989), the dragon-riding game DragonStrike (1990) and then the game that made its name in fantasy, Eye of the Beholder (1991), followed quickly by Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon.

In 1992 Virgin Games bought the studio, which became Westwood Studios. Under Virgin it released Dune II (1992), the template for the real-time strategy genre, and Command & Conquer (1995), whose series Guinness World Records later credited with 30 million sales. In August 1998 Electronic Arts bought Westwood and its sister studio Burst from Virgin for $122.5 million. The studio's late projects included the online space game Earth & Beyond (2002), which disappointed its publisher. In January 2003 EA announced that it would fold Westwood into EA Los Angeles, and the Las Vegas studio closed on March 31, 2003. Some of its veterans founded Petroglyph Games the next month.

Notable work

Eye of the Beholder took the real-time, grid-based First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers') popularized by FTL's Dungeon Master and set it beneath the city of Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms. Four adventurers moved as one blob through stone corridors while kobolds, beholders and a mind flayer came at them in real time; the game translated D&D rules into mouse clicks on portraits and weapons. SSI sold more than 129,000 copies of it; first released for MS-DOS and the Amiga in 1991, it was later ported to the PC-98, Super NES and Sega CD. When Westwood moved to Virgin, SSI made Eye of the Beholder III in-house.

Westwood kept the style but set it in its own world with Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993), a lavishly animated first-person RPG, followed by Guardians of Destiny (1997) and Lands of Lore III (1999). The studio also made the fairy-tale adventure trilogy The Legend of Kyrandia (from 1992) and the action RPG Nox (2000).

Legacy

Westwood is remembered above all for real-time strategy, but its fantasy work mattered. Eye of the Beholder proved that official AD&D games could be fast and tactile rather than purely turn-based, and it brought the Dungeon crawl to a large console and computer audience before 3D engines took over. Its line runs from Dungeon Master to modern grid-based crawlers, just as its real-time strategy games opened the way for the fantasy RTS of Blizzard. Westwood's closure became a lasting example of EA's consolidation of acquired studios, a story repeated with Origin Systems and Mythic.