Vicarious Visions

Vicarious Visions is an American video game developer founded by the high school brothers Karthik and Guha Bala in 1990, which developed some PC and Game Boy Color games in late 90's and 2000. They later developed Terminus, which won two Independent Games Festival Awards in 1999. They became known as a leading developer of handheld games breaking ground by porting the Tony Hawk's series to Game Boy Advance for the system launch in 2001 and were responsible for the Nintendo DS versions of the Spider-Man games, Spider-Man 2 and Ultimate Spider-Man. They're also known for Crash Nitro Kart and ports of Jedi Knight II & Jedi Academy as well as porting id Software's Doom 3 to the Xbox.

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

In the late 1990s, Vicarious Visions appointed Michael Marvin, an Albany based investor and entrepreneur and founder and former CEO of MapInfo; and Charles S. Jones, investor, who sat on the boards of various software and industrial companies including Geac and PSDI, to its board of directors. Under their leadership, a sale of the company was negotiated to Activision, earning the original investors over 20x their initial investment.

In January 2005, Vicarious Visions was acquired by publisher Activision and together made Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, which was the second Wi-Fi-enabled DS game. Beginning with Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Vicarious Visions has been the developer for the Guitar Hero series on the Nintendo DS and Wii platforms. For Guitar Hero: On Tour, Vicarious Visions created the "Guitar Grip" peripheral for the Nintendo DS, which emulates the guitar controller for the portable system.

As of February 2010, Vicarious Visions replaced Neversoft as developer for future Guitar Hero games.

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.

In February 2011, the company made 50 developers redundant following Activision's announcement that it was closing its music gamedevision and cancelling development on future Guitar Hero titles.^[1]

It was revealed on June 10, 2011, that Vicarious Visions was working on the 3DS version of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure.^[2]

Games developed

References

External links

• Official website