Croteam
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Croteam is a video game developer established in Zagreb, Croatia in 1993, initially as a "garage games" company, as they only had six employees for the development of their first major game, Serious Sam, in 2001.
Their first game, Football Glory (1993), an average football game, became widely known after Sensible Software threatened the Croatian company court action after the (many) similarities between their debut title and Sensible's flagship product. After that action, Croteam stopped developing Football Glory. Although with less polished gameplay, Football Glory had more moves than Sensible's (backheels and overhead kicks, among others) and humouristic elements: the game could be stopped after a bobby police officer chased a hooligan or a streaker advocating safe sex invaded the pitch. It was released for both DOS and Amiga.
With the shadow of Sensible Software over them, no further development could be done with Football Glory. So Croteam worked around the deal and released Five-A-Side soccer in 1994, an indoor soccer version of Football Glory, this time only for the Amiga. One year later, Save The Earth, a game for a television contest, was also developed.
A long hiatus followed, broken by the first title of the Serious Sam series in 2001, followed by Serious Sam: The Second Encounter in 2002. Both games used Croteam's in-house Serious Engine and became well-known because of their arcade-style gameplay. A sequel, Serious Sam II was released on October 11, 2005, and features the updated Serious Engine 2.
