X-Fire

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X-Fire is an unpublished computer game from 1997. It was commissioned by video game publisher Sir-Tech and developed by Engineering Animation, Inc. (EAI).

[edit] Development

In 1996, X-Fire (meant to be pronounced "Crossfire") was to be EAI's Salt Lake City's studio first published game. Though this was to be Ames, Iowa-based EAI's first game, the studio was actually made up of video game development veterans, led by Bryan Brandenburg (EAI acquired Brandenburg's game development company, Software Arts International, in order to break into the video game industry). The game featured cutting-edge features for the time, such as 16-bit graphics and network play.

The game design evolved over several months and several name changes (it was originally slated to be called Eclipse). EAI SLC quickly hired on new people to handle the workload for the game. What eventually emerged was a graphically-rich, action-based sci-fi game. It could be compared to Diablo, though it featured 65,000 colors, as opposed to Diablo's 256, and focused more on action than role playing.

Game development ended near the end of 1997 when EAI delivered their beta to Sir-Tech. Though Sir-Tech had been consulted on the game's progress throughout its development, they wanted several changes before agreeing the game was complete. Though EAI conceeded that there were a few outstanding bugs, they contended that Sir-Tech's list of demands was too extensive, and that implementing them was beyond the scope of their contract. As a result of this and a long line of weak releases, Sir-Tech soon went under near the end of 1997. Sir-Tech blamed their demise on EAI and other developers when it referred to them as "several shady developers."

[edit] Afterward

Though Sir-Tech failed to publish X-Fire, they had made interum payments to EAI during its development. By the time X-Fire development ended, EAI had several other game development contracts lined up. From the unpublished game, EAI was able to extract two libraries, IsoWorld (an isometric perspective graphics library) and EAGLE (a game GUI library), which it used in several subsequent titles, including Clue, Scooby Doo: Mystery of the Fun Park Phantom and Animaniacs Splat Ball.

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