The GOAT Store
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The GOAT Store, LLC. | |
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| Type | Limited liability company |
|---|---|
| Founded | May 15, 2001 |
| Headquarters | Wisconsin |
| Key people | Dan Loosen, founder, Gary Heil, founder |
| Industry | Video games |
| Products | Feet of Fury, Inhabitants, Maqiupai, Cool Herders, GOAT Games |
| Employees | 2 |
| Website | http://www.goatstore.com/ |
The GOAT Store is an American video game developer and publisher that was officially formed as a Limited liability company in the state of Wisconsin on May 15, 2001. The name GOAT is derived from Games Of All Types. The mascot is Copper, the goat of Jeff Minter of Llamasoft.
[edit] History
The GOAT Store started out as Team 13, consisting of Dan Loosen and Gary Heil. Team 13 was a subsidiary of the former Atari Jaguar and Atari Lynx developer Dark Knight Games, now known as Chasma, Inc, a developer of games for cellphones.
Team 13 was set up to design and sell products for the Atari Jaguar and Atari Lynx, as officially licensed developers under Dark Knight Games. They had designed a joystick extension for Atari Jaguar joypads, known as the "Team 13 joystick". They also spent between $1500 and $2000 worth of Atari Lynx equipment in order to develop games for the system. After this they designed a more sturdy joystick for the Jaguar using arcade-quality parts called the "Jaguar JAMMA Joystick".
Dark Knight Games reneged on their deal to offer financial backing for Team 13, and after Dan and Gary were out the money they had spent on their Atari system projects. They formed The GOAT Store out of the ashes of Team 13, and sold their "Jaguar JAMMA Joysticks" through their website, as well as most of their Atari Lynx equipment.
During the time that they were Atari Lynx developers, they had designed a game based on the Atari 2600 game Ram It!. The game, R3K, is currently being remade for the Dreamcast with updated graphics and some of the aesthetic style of Tempest 2000.
The GOAT Store is also an annual sponsor of the Midwest Gaming Classic, with owners Dan Loosen and Gary Heil also being the co-founders of the show.
[edit] GOAT Store Publishing
In 2003, The GOAT Store formed a division known as GOAT Store Publishing. GOAT Store Publishing would sell games for the Sega Dreamcast system, a platform that could run games on standard CD-ROMs without the need of a modchip through a format Sega had developed for enhanced audio CDs known as the MilCD format.
The first game to be published under the GOAT Store Publishing label was Feet of Fury. At the end of 2003, they had agreed to be the publisher for the winning games in the first annual Dream On Contest, which was being sponsored by Cyberdog Castle. The winning games in this contest, Inhabitants and Maqiupai, were scheduled to be released in early 2004. Due to errors in the manufacturing process, the pressed games would not run on Sega Dreamcast systems. The pressing company had a clause in their contract that protected them from liability against any problems resulting from the pressing process, so The GOAT Store was out of the money from the erroneous pressing. After many months of trying to seek out a suitable replacement CD pressing company, the games were finally released in early 2005.
