Housemarque

Housemarque in short
Company history
Contact info

Years 2004-2006

During the 3 year period period starting early 2004, Housemarque did work on many different platforms. We invested heavily on Playstation2 and PSP technology and concepts, but unfortunately weren't able to sign a project on those platforms. Most of the revenue was derived from mobile platforms. During the second half of 2004, we started to work on a game for Tapwave Zodic, but unfortunately the platfom failed and the game was never published. Our next game project was Gizmondo Motocross 2005 and was actually published, but the colourful and short history of Gizmondo handheld got to an end later the same year. Year 2005 was also a year, when Housemarque developed two high-end java games. One of those was based on a movie “The Chronicles of Narnia”.

We also developed a high-end 3D demo for Nokia, which they used in their GDC 2006 keynote speech. Starting from Spring 2006, we did consulting, coding and code optimization work for Guerrilla´s PSP exclusive “Killzone:Liberation”.

After finishing off the optimization work for Guerrilla, we set our sights on next generation consoles. When the year 2006 ended, Housemarque was working on both Playstation Network title for Playstation 3 and on an XBLA product for Xbox 360.

Highlights of year 2003

In the year 2003, Housemarque did development work with two new platforms for the company. Firstly, we developed a snowboarding game called “Floboarding” for Nokia’s new “gamedeck” N-Gage and did other development work relating to Nokia Game 2003 experience. Our “Floboarding” game was being distributed in a MMC memory card with N-Gage around Europe. The second platform we tackled was Playstation2. We have done extensive research and technology development and by the end of the year, we had our technology finished and were ready to develop a playable demo on our new concept. To further our multi platform capabilities, we engineered our coding in a way that we were able to use PC’s in our development work without the need for expensive PS2 development kits. In effect, our software is running on both PC and PS2 meaning that were would able to handle the shipment of our games for both platforms practically simultaneously, if needed.

Highlights of the year 2002

Housemarque first console game “Transworld Snowboarding” was published during Autumn 2002. R&D efforts were concentrated on building a non-platform specific “Game Core” that enables us to kick-start new projects in a short period of time and allows us to work on multi-platform games. Also, we created our “Verse” scripting language to be used to created compelling, interactive gaming environments. One big step was also to begin to work on PS2 visualisation technology on the top of our “Game Core”. Our content R&D resulted some exiting prototypes and concepts that are original with a mass-market appeal.

Highlights of the year 2001

During the year, we further strengthened our internal selection of game development tools. Titled as “Groundworks”, our 2nd generation level editor is helping us to create game levels flexibly and efficiently. Our technology is now best suitable landscape based games varying from motocross and ATV racing games to gravity based sports games like downhill biking, and, yes, snowboarding. Also, we updated our internal libraries and other tools to work on Microsoft’s Xbox console.

One noteworthy highlight of the fiscal year was our first three-month game programmer course we held for a group of enthusiastic coders willing to find out what working, as a game programmer is all about. This has enabled us to get more educated programmers to our team to get them work productively in a much shorter time period than usually.

Highlights of the years 1999-2000

Housemarque continued to work with one of the biggest publishers Infogrames to make a snowboarding game for the Microsoft’s next generation console platform. The project was started in Summer 2000 and this was Housemarque first game for any consoles although the style of the games we have developed in the past have been more suitable for console than PC platforms. The change from PC to console was clearly a new direction for the company, although it was no that big a change when it comes to development. We had accumulated experience on making next generation 3D games and using C++ for development since 1998. This gave us an advantage for developing for next-generation consoles, because we are already accustomed for building the next generation 3D games.

"Supreme Snowboarding"/"Boarder Zone" for PC was published by Infogrames worldwide. In Europe it was released in the late November 1999. Other regions followed the next year, including Japan in January and North America in March 2000. The game successfully has sold over 1,4 million units worldwide.

Housemarque took an equity stake in a new company called Springtoys. The company was founded in December 1999 and the groundwork for the company was done at Housemarque during the autumn '99. The company later merged with Codeonline early 2002. In connection with the merger, the company took a new name Codetoys (for more info, see http://www.codetoys.com). The company is developing entertainment for mobile platforms like phones and PDA's. Investors include Bertelsmann Capital Ventures, AOL Time Warner Ventures and Motorola.

The company also continued to work on tools and technology, which are the backbone of the development work.

Short history 1995-Q1 1999

Housemarque was founded in 1995 by people behind the first two Finnih game development companiess called Bloodhouse and Terramarque. 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.

Housemarque developed 3 PC CD-ROM titles (Super Stardust 1996, Alien Incident 1996, 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 included 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, we signed a contract with Infogrames to develop “Supreme Snowboarding” 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, our snowboarding game had already gained some reputation being one of the most visually stunning games around. For instance, 3Dfx showed our game in 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 the same year. The game was displayed on a giant 12-monitor set up and it gathered a lot attention during the show.