Dune 2000 game atreides actor3/29/2023 Westwood became one of the best in the industry at a very tricky task, not so much porting their source games in any conventional sense as remaking them, with dramatically enhanced graphics and sound. Up-porting was in its way as difficult as down-porting owners of those more expensive 16-bit machines expected their capabilities to be used to good effect, even by games that had originated on more humble platforms, and complained loudly at straight, vanilla ports that still looked like they were running on an 8-bit computer. Having cut their teeth making Commodore 64 games work within the constraints of the Apple II, they now found themselves moving them in the other direction: “up-porting” Commodore 64 hits like Super Cycle and California Games to the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. This love of immediacy would translate, as we’ll soon see, into the invention of a whole new genre known as real-time strategy, which would become one of the most popular of them all by the end of the 1990s.īut first, there were more games to be ported. Asked many years later what common thread binds together their dizzily eclectic catalog of games, Louis Castle hit upon real-time gameplay as the one reasonable answer. This blind alley really does have much to tell us about Westwood’s personality. So, they had to begrudgingly switch it back to turn-based. “Epyx felt,” remembers Castle with no small sense of irony, “that gamers would not want to make complicated tactical and strategic decisions under pressure.” More sensibly, Epyx noted that Westwood had delivered not so much a port as a different game entirely, one they couldn’t possibly sell as representing the same experience as the original. They converted the game from a cerebral turn-based CRPG to a frenetic real-time action-adventure, only to be greeted with howls of protest from their employers. Epyx hired them to port the hoary old classic Temple of Apshai to the sexy new Apple Macintosh, and Sperry and Castle got a bit carried away. The story of Westwood’s very first project is something of a harbinger of their future. (The company would become known as Westwood Studios in 1992, by which time it would be pretty clear that no such pivot would be necessary.) “We chose Westwood as the company name,” says Castle, “to capture some of the feeling of youthful energy and Hollywood business.” The “Associates,” meanwhile, was nicely non-specific, meaning they could easily pivot into other kinds of software development if the games work should dry up for some reason. The “Westwood” came from the trendy neighborhood of Los Angeles, around the UCLA campus, where they liked to hang out when they drove down from Las Vegas of a weekend. In March of 1985, they decided to give up working as independent contractors and form a real company, which they named Westwood Associates. Sperry and Castle eventually came to specialize in the non-trivial feat of moving slick action games such as Dragonfire and Impossible Mission from the Commodore 64 to the far less audiovisually capable Apple II without sacrificing all of their original appeal. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the industry, but, at a time when the PC marketplace was fragmented into close to a dozen incompatible platforms, it was certainly a vital one. Through Castle’s contacts at the store - the home-computer industry was quite a small place back then - they found work as contract programmers, porters who moved software from one platform to another. They were both Apple II fanatics, both talented programmers, and both go-getters accustomed to going above and beyond what was expected of them. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he looked at some animation and programming I was working on.” Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school.
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