Nihilistic Software

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nihilistic Software is a video game developer based in Novato, California.

Nihilistic was founded in March 1998 by Ray Gresko, Robert Huebner, and Steve Tietze. Gresko and Huebner had formerly worked at LucasArts, and Tietze had worked at Rogue Entertainment. Many of Nihilistic’s employees were drawn from LucasArts, working on games such as Jedi Knight.

The first game produced by Nihilistic was Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, set in the a role-playing world created by White Wolf. Released in 2000, Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption was published by Activision for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh computers.

For their next project, Nihilistic began to develop StarCraft: Ghost, supervised by StarCraft creator Blizzard Entertainment. In mid-2004, Nihilistic ceased working on StarCraft: Ghost, although the circumstances behind this are not entirely clear. The project was taken up by Swingin' Ape Studios, which was later bought by Blizzard. Finally in March 2006, Blizzard Entertainment announced that StarCraft: Ghost was placed on indefinite hold.

Meanwhile in 2005, Nihilistic completed development on Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, a fighting game based on Marvel Comics' various superheroes. Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects was published by Electronic Arts, the world’s largest game publisher, for Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube.

Nihilistic released their first 'next-gen' title Conan for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. According to a preview article in the March 2007 issue of Game Informer Magazine, Conan is an action/adventure game based on Robert E. Howard’s famous sword and sorcery hero, Conan The Barbarian. This title was released by the publisher THQ on October 23rd, 2007.