Vicarious Visions

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Karthik Bala

A look inside at their present headquarters

Vicarious Visions is a video game developer. It was founded by brothers Karthik and Guha Bala while in high school circa 1990. Developers of Terminus, it won them two Independent Games Festival Awards in 1999. They became known as a leading developer of handheld games breaking ground by porting the Tony Hawk series to Game Boy Advance for the system launch in 2001. The Spider-Man games Spider-Man 2 (DS launch title) and Ultimate Spider-Man were brought to the Nintendo DS handheld system. They're also known for Crash Nitro Kart and successful ports of Jedi Knight II & Jedi Academy as well as Id software's Doom 3.

Terminus, an online, multiplayer space trading and combat simulation game, was notable for including Windows, Linux, and Macintosh versions in its retail packaging. The game is currently fan-supported. The largest site devoted to the game is http://www.terminuspoint.com/.

In 2003, VV acquired the assets of struggling middleware tools provider Intrinsic Graphics, folding the technology into its own production suite.

In January 2005, Vicarious Visions was acquired by publisher Activision. After being acquired, they have since made the successful Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, which was the second Nintendo Wi-fi Connection enabled game.

The headquarters of Vicarious Visions is located in a newly-renovated section of an old industrial building in Menands, New York, just outside the state capital of Albany.