| Industry | Computer and video games |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Key people | Charlie Cleveland, founder and director |
| Products | Natural Selection Zen of Sudoku Natural Selection 2 Decoda |
| Employees | 6 |
| Website | www.unknownworlds.com |
Unknown Worlds (UWE) is an independently-owned American game development company whose goal is to "unite the world through play". Based in San Francisco, California, the studio is best known for the forthcoming sequel to Natural Selection, due to be released in 2011.
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Unknown Worlds was formed in May 2001 by Charlie Cleveland and began life as a the collective developers responsible for the development of the high profile free mod Natural Selection.
The phenomenal success of Natural Selection convinced Cleveland to start work on a commercial sequel to the game: Natural Selection 2. Soon after Cleveland founded Unknown Worlds Entertainment as a commercial computer games studio.
To help fund the development of Natural Selection 2, the studio created and released Zen of Sudoku in November 2006, a casual puzzle computer game based on the popular logic puzzle Sudoku. This game was a departure from Natural Selection both in terms of genre and audience.
In October 2006, Max McGuire became the studio's first employee, having previously worked at Iron Lore Entertainment as Lead Engine Programmer. McGuire became the Technical Director of UWE and development of Natural Selection 2 began in earnest.
A year later, Unknown Worlds released Decoda as a commercial debugger for the Lua programming language. This application was created to aid with development of Natural Selection 2, whose game code was largely being written in Lua.
Later on in development of Natural Selection 2, the studio announced it had changed engine from the Source engine to their own proprietary engine developed in-house. After consulting their fanbase on a possible name for their new engine, it was finally named the Evolution engine. Later it transpired that "Evolution" was already taken and "Spark" was chosen as the new name for the engine.[1].
In June 2008, Cory Strader was hired as Art Director[2]. Strader had been a previous key member of the development team for Natural Selection.
In May 2009, Unknown Worlds began taking pre-orders for standard and special edition versions of Natural Selection 2.
Natural Selection 2 is currently in development and the alpha version was released on July 26th 2010 to all that have pre-ordered the special edition of the game.
Natural Selection