I am a motherfucking Jedi Master.

I always knew this, but after spending an hour crushing my enemies solely with the power of my brain in the appropriately named, first-person smash-em-up game Throw Trucks with Your Mind … oh yeah. Confirmed, baby. The Force is strong with me. Moving and aiming in its open arena keeps to standard PC keyboard/mouse configurations, but combat plays out entirely on a mental level courtesy of lightweight, wireless, commercially available EEG headsets.

So yes, you actually throw a virtual truck (bearing a superficial resemblance to Halo’s Warthog) with your mind and crush other players with it. Crates, barrels, and cement blocks, too. But that truck is the one-hit-kill motherload.

It’s also tougher to move than anything else. Size matters not, but throw-attacks require your full concentration. Specifically, NeuroSky’s Mindwave headset reads spikes in your brain’s beta waves, and the game translates them into proportional telekinetic force. “It doesn’t matter what you focus on so long as you focus,” says Lat Ware, the game’s creator/designer. “It’s the act of giving attention to one thing and taking it away from everything else.”

Ware’s done exactly that to get his game off the ground, and it’s been a long time coming. A graduate of famed game design school DigiPen and an alumnus of developers Realtime Worlds (APB: All Points Bulletin) and Crypic Studios (Star Trek Online, Champions Online), Ware first came across NeuroSky’s brain-monitoring EEG devices eight years ago.

“NeuroSky did a demo of their headset using the Half-Life 2 engine,” he says. “They had cars and chairs, and you could lift things and push things. I thought this had the potential to be the best thing ever, so I went to the people in the booth and said, ‘When are you making this game?’ And they said, ‘Never.’”

Six years later, NeuroSky launched the MindWave, a commercial-market EEG headset. That’s what Ware had been waiting for. “I said, ‘OK, I’m making the game you refused to make.’”

Candidly, the game he’s making — on the cheap, no less, using Unreal Development Kit freeware — is seriously awesome, though it definitely takes getting used to. I had to figure out what to focus on and how to channel that focus in order to do some damage. Ware told me a friend of his with ADHD does math problems in his head to get objects rolling, but since math is for suckers, I ended up holding out a hand, Star Wars-style, to exert my will on the game. That worked just fine. With a mimed shove, I sent the truck smashing into my first unsuspecting victim.

I’ve test driven a few sluggish, dull games using biometric inputs, and they don’t even compare. Ware’s game moves and responds to my level of expectation.

And it’ a pure, giddy thrill when you launch something across the arena just by thinking about it. If that emptied Throw Trucks’ box of tricks, I’d still be fairly amused by it, but Ware’s building a much deeper experience that casual and core gamers can dig into … assuming Throw Trucks reaches its Kickstarter goal and actually gets made.

Pages: 1 2

What if LucasArts never existed? What if the irascible filmmaker, beloved (and despised) the world over for his invaluable contributions to the pop-culture lexicon, had stuck to making space operas and juvenile fantasies about archeologists in fedora hats? What if George Lucas never entered the arena of gaming 30 years ago?

LucasArts revolutionized, created, or nurtured several whole genres, so its absence would’ve irreparably hindered the burgeoning video game medium. The San Francisco-based developer and publisher gave the point-and-click adventure – a heretofore obscure niche – a serious shot in the arm (and doctors everywhere an influx of carpal tunnel patients).

It reinvigorated the space shooter, redefined console RPGs, and when Jar Jar Binks took a dump on the collective geek fandom, it even reignited the ailing Star Wars franchise. LucasArts games have appeared on every major console, from early 1980s consoles such as the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision to the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, including dank parlors of teenage truancy (i.e., arcades).

LucasArts has dabbled in almost every genre in gaming: point-and-click adventures, space shooters, first-person shooters, action, sidescrollers, role-playing games, MMORPGs, and even fighting games.

Suffice to say that the forerunner of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Maniac Mansion, and Monkey Island had a significant impact on gaming.

Humble beginnings

George Lucas founded LucasArts, the gaming arm of LucasFilm, in 1982 – the same year that Lucas’ frequent collaborator, Steven Spielberg, unleashed the interactive version of his adorable, alcoholic, bipedal alien, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. While the latter nearly destroyed gaming in its infancy, LucasArts would weather the great crash of 1983 and reemerge for the medium’s second renaissance in North America in 1985.

LucasArts originally partnered with the premier North American video game company – Atari – and in 1984, produced inventive action titles like Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus! for the 5200 and 7800 systems. PC versions followed a year later.

During the era of Reagan, greed, and the imminent fall of the Soviet Union (aka the 1980s), LucasArts developed a number of military simulations, including PHM Pegasus (1986), Strike Fleet (1987), and Battlehawks 1942 (1989). This was no accident.

One of Lucas’ prime inspirations for the Star Wars trilogy – especially the gee-wiz, outerspace dogfighting scenes – were swashbuckling, jingoistic World War II flicks, and he’d explore this more directly with the 2012 film Red Tails.

LucasArts would revisit combat sims years later, but under the guise of its flagship franchise – Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998) and Star Wars: Starfighter (2001), to name but a few. They’d also return to the WWII era with 2003′s aerial-warfare title, Secret Weapons Over Normandy.

Planting the point-and-click adventure flag

LucasArts found its stride with repetitive mouse clicks and a little game called Maniac Mansion (1987). Creators Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick designed a loving tribute to B-movies, kitschy horror films, and ’80s teen flicks.

Maniac Mansion – based on Skywalker Ranch – gave the intrepid point-and-click explorer the opportunity to solve puzzles, navigate the sort of prepubescent stupidity that only exists in horror flicks, and for the budding serial killer, microwave a hamster. Seriously.

It also introduced the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM), a scripting/programming language that saw action in every subsequent LucasArts adventure game.

SCUMM was the subject of numerous in-jokes, not the least of which was the Razor and the Scummettes band from Maniac Mansion and the “SCUMM bar” in The Secret of Monkey Island (1990).

The latter, of course, established LucasArts as the premier developer of adventure games on the planet. Maniac Mansion and SCUMM alumni, Ron Gilbert, returned for The Secret of Monkey Island, and a young Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend) cut his teeth on this seminal adventure title.

Apart from Star Wars, Monkey Island is probably LucasArts’ most enduring franchise.

Teenaged pirate Guybrush Threepwood returned for four sequels, including Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991), The Curse of Monkey Island (1997), Escape from Monkey Island (2000), and the episodic Tales of Monkey Island (2009).

Talk about longevity – from the original Monkey Island to Tales, the series spans nearly two decades. This puts it roughly equivalent to video game stalwarts (and franchise superstars) like Mega Man, the latter of which only has about four years on Monkey Island.

Indy takes the spotlight

Before LucasArts made its bones in the adventure genre with Maniac Mansion, it dipped its toes in the water with Labyrinth, based on the Jim Henson (and Lucasfilm) fantasy movie. But that was just a taste.

The globetrotting archeologist (of the fedora hat and whip variety) also saw numerous video-game adaptations. Many of the early Indiana Jones titles were movie tie-ins (Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600, The Last Crusade for the Genesis and NES), and LucasArts didn’t publish or develop most of them.

The house that Lucas built assumed auteur duties for the point-and-click adventure game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), a critically acclaimed genre title, and LucasArts subsequently took charge for Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999), Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003), and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings (2009).

Alas, I feel like I’m forgetting one particular franchise…

Wars among the stars

LucasFilm’s cash cow was a stalwart of video gaming since Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1982) for the Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision and the Star Wars arcade game (1983). But Lucas’ in-house development studio didn’t work on it until the X-Wing franchise.

The DOS-based space-combat sim put you in the cockpit of various Rebel starfighters – X-wings, Y-wings, and A-wings – ultimately tasking you with assaulting the Death Star itself. Lead designer Lawrence Holland borrowed a number of gameplay elements from his previous WWII flight sim, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.

X-Wing included a revolutionary 3D flight engine, the template for every succeeding space-combat sim, and won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1993.

But it was the sequel – much like with the Star Wars cinematic franchise – that ensured X-Wing’s enduring legacy.

Remember Vader’s wingmen from A New Hope (DS-61-2 and DS-61-3, if my memory serves … yes, I’m a hopeless Star Wars geek)? Ever wanted to be them (or a reasonable facsimile, given that those two chuckleheads screwed up, one collided with Vader, and essentially helped saved the Alliance)?

Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994) gave budding Imperialists the chance to play as the bad guys. This was followed by the multiplayer-oriented X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (1997) and later by X-Wing Alliance (1999).

Star Wars: Rebel Assault (1993) uses FMV cut-scenes, pre-rendered 3D backdrops, and digitized music and footage from the movies to re-create the trilogy beneath the helmet and behind the trigger of “Rookie One” (a transparent stand-in for another famous Tatooine moisture farmer who walks among the sky).

The sequel, Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire (1995), incorporated original footage of real actors, with high production values and expert use of John Williams’ iconic score. But the clunky, on-rails gameplay kept the game from achieving its predecessor’s fortune and glory (to reference another famous LucasArts franchise).

Meatbags, Jedi, and console RPGs

By 2002, the consensus among the collective Star Wars fandom was that the franchise was overexposed. Episode I: The Phantom Menace took the series in what some perceived as a new kid-friendly direction, alienating long-time fans, and most of the games that followed in its wake were mediocre (at best).

Then along came a console role-playing game called Knights of the old Republic (2003), featuring customizable classes, witty dialogue, and a mature, multilayered narrative. In other words, it was everything that the prequel trilogy (Episodes I, II, and III) tried (and mostly failed) to be. KOTOR was an immediate hit with gamers, and PC and Mac ports followed shortly thereafter.

LucasArts published the sequel, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II — The Sith Lords, for the Xbox and Windows PC in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

‘Block’ party

In 2005, LucasArts inaugurated the Lego video game craze with Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, an instant multiplayer classic. And since your characters could never truly die (they explode in a cacophony of cute, Lego body parts, only to instantly respawn), it’s also a family-friendly classic.

While not the first Lego-branded video game (that would be 1997’s Lego Island), it indisputably launched the current renaissance, and its success compelled LucasArts to release a slew of sequels and spinoffs, including Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006), Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (2007), a compilation of the prior two, and Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011).

Henry Jones Junior (aka Indiana) also got a couple titles, Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008) and Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues (2009).

Credit LucasArts for igniting the Lego gaming craze – non-Lucas franchises, including Batman and Harry Potter, rode the former’s wave of success.

Experimental phase

Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995) capitalized on the popularity of Doom and took the Star Wars franchise into the realm of first-person shooters. It spawned a sequel, Star Wars: Jedi Knight — Dark Forces II (1997) and the Star Wars: Jedi Knight third-person action series.

LucasArts dabbled in strategy with Star Wars: Rebellion (1998), Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds (2001) and Star Wars: Empire at War (2006), and it ventured into the tempestuous world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games with Star Wars: Galaxies (2003) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011). While the former was plagued by bugs and an overly complex progression and class system, the latter acquitted itself much better.

In one of the most bizarre uses of the Star Wars license, LucasArts created the 1997 fighting game, Masters of Teräs Käsi, a poorly received mess.

Third-person action title Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, a multimedia craze (punctuated by the official canonical sanctioning by one George Lucas), launched with the Nintendo 64 in 1996, while the recent Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (2008) presented an uncommonly superb narrative, even if it was mechanically flawed (and even if the 2010 sequel threw out all the nuance and subtlety of its predecessor).

The future

By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard that everybody’s favorite cartoon mouse purchased Lucasfilm (and LucasArts) for a cool $4.05 billion. What does this mean for the future of the gaming division? Lucasfilm spokesperson Barbara Gamlen told GamesBeat that “For the time being, all projects are business as usual.”

This might suggest that Disney has no plans to tinker with the forthcoming Star Wars 1313, the M-rated action-adventure title revealed at this year’s E3 (to the delight of fanboys everywhere, myself included). But considering the mass-media juggernaut’s family-friendly facade, gamers are rightfully concerned.

GamesBeat will continue to document the rich history of LucasArts as it develops and hope that a new chairman of the board subscribes to the light side of the force.

Here’s to 30 more years of quality LucasArts gaming.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

No console is perfect from a developer’s perspective. Each has its limitations, and each has its strengths. When Reddit user El_dorito asked game makers to describe what working with each major console is like, Cory Bloyd chimed in to share his interesting experiences. Bloyd currently works with MunkyFun but is sure to reiterate that everything he’s said here reflects only his own opinions and not those of his current or past employers.

Below is Bloyd’s post in its entirety:

PlayStation 1: Everything is simple and straightforward. With a few years of dedication, one person could understand the entire PS1 down to the bit level. Compared to what you could do on PCs of the time, it was amazing. But, every step of the way you said “Really? I gotta do it that way? God damn. OK, I guess… Give me a couple weeks.” There was effectively no debugger. You launched your build and watched what happened.

N64: Everything just kinda works. For the most part, it was fast and flexible. You never felt like you were utilizing it well. But, it was OK because your half-assed efforts usually looked better than most PS1 games. Each megabyte on the cartridge cost serious money. There was a debugger, but the debugger would sometimes have completely random bugs such as off-by-one-errors in the type determination of the watch window (displaying your variables by reinterpreting the the bits as the type that was declared just prior to the actual type of the variable –true story).

Dreamcast: The CPU was weird (Hitatchi [sic] SH-4). The GPU was weird (a predecessor to the PowerVR chips in modern iPhones). There were a bunch of features you didn’t know how to use. Microsoft kinda, almost talked about setting it up as a PC-like DirectX box, but didn’t follow through. That’s [sic] wouldn’t have worked out anyway. It seemed like it could be really cool. But man, the PS2 is gonna be so much better!

PS2: You are handed a 10-inch thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers. The first time you read the stack, nothing makes any sense at all. The second time your read the stack, the 3rd book makes a bit more sense because of what you learned in the 8th book. The machine has 10 different processors (IOP, SPU1&2, MDEC, R5900, VU0&1, GIF, VIF, GS) and 6 different memory spaces (IOP, SPU, CPU, GS, VU0&1) that all work in completely different ways. There are so many amazing things you can do, but everything requires backflips through invisible blades of segfault. Getting the first triangle to appear on the screen took some teams over a month because it involved routing commands through R5900->VIF->VU1->GIF->GS oddities with no feedback about what your were doing wrong until you got every step along the way to be correct. If you were willing to do [sic] twist your game to fit the machine, you could get awesome results. There was a debugger for the main CPU (R5900). It worked pretty OK. For the rest of the processors, you just had to write code without bugs.

GameCube: I didn’t work with the GC much. It seems really flexible. Like you could do anything, but nothing would be terribly bad or great. The GPU wasn’t very fast, but it’s [sic] features were tragically underutilized compared to the Xbox. The CPU had incredibly low-latency RAM. Any messy, pointer-chasing, complicated data structure you could imagine should be just fine (in theory). Just do it. But, more than half of the RAM was split off behind an amazingly high-latency barrier. So, you had to manually organize your data in to active vs bulk. It had a half-assed SIMD that would do 2 floats at a time instead of 1 or 4.

PSP: Didn’t do much here either. It was played up as a trimmed-down PS2, but from the inside it felt more like a bulked-up PS1. They tried to bolt-on some parts to make it less of a pain to work with, but those parts felt clumsy compared to the original design. Having pretty much the full-speed PS2 rasterizer for a smaller resolution display meant you didn’t worry about blending pixels.

Xbox: Smells like a PC. There were a few tricks you could dig into to push the machine. But, for the most part it was enough of a blessing to have a single, consistent PC spec to develop against. The debugger worked! It really, really worked! PIX was hand-delivered by angels.

Xbox 360: Other than the big-endian thing, it really smells like a PC –until you dug into it. The GPU is great –except that the limited EDRAM means that your have to draw your scene twice to comply with the anti-aliasing requirement? WTF! Holy Crap there are a lot of SIMD registers! 4 floats x 128 registers x 6 registers banks = 12K of registers! You are handed DX9 and everything works out of the box. But, if you dig in, you find better ways to do things. Deeper and deeper. Eventually, your code looks nothing like PC-DX9 and it works soooo much better than it did before! The debugger is awesome! PIX! PIX! I Kiss You!

PS3: A 95 pound box shows up on your desk with a printout of the 24-step instructions for how to turn it on for the first time. Everyone tries, most people fail to turn it on. Eventually, one guy goes around and sets up everyone else’s machine. There’s only one CPU. It seems like it might be able to do everything, but it can’t. The SPUs seem like they should be really awesome, but not for anything you or anyone else is doing. The CPU debugger works pretty OK. There is no SPU debugger. There was nothing like PIX at first. Eventually some Sony 1st-party devs got fed up and made their own PIX-like GPU debugger. The GPU is very, very disappointing… Most people try to stick to working with the CPU, but it can’t handle the workload. A few people dig deep into the SPUs and, Dear God, they are fast! Unfortunately, they eventually figure out that the SPUs need to be devoted almost full time making up for the weaknesses of the GPU.

He later edited the post to add the following:

This has picked up a lot more attention than I expected when I tossed it together! I’ll add that even though I give Sony a hard time, I really do enjoy pounding on their machines. Sony consoles have always been a challenge. But, if you are willing to work with them instead of against them, they love you back tenfold.

GamesBeat reached out to Bloyd to confirm that he is a developer and for specifics on some of the studios he’s worked for.

His work began as an intern at High Voltage Software where he handled his first PlayStation dev kit. After eight years there, Bloyd moved to LucasArts where he was the senior graphics engineer for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. His work included three years of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 development.

Things became rough for LucasArts, and many of the employees left with a handful of them forming MunkyFun. Bloyd has been at the developer for the last three years. While the company’s original goal was to create Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network games, it found that the mobile market offered opportunities more suited for the small team.

According to Bloyd, “all of the platforms have their issues and oddities.” If he had to choose the easiest console to develop for, however, it would be the original Xbox while the PlayStation 2 was the most difficult.

“Developers like to complain about the PS3, but we know it’s actually a breeze compared to what the PS2 demanded,” he says, but, “in the end, what it really comes down to is how well positioned you are to devote yourself to a platform.”

Porting a game from one console to another can be a headache for developers, too. “If your plan is to pop in and get something pre-existing to just ‘run there, too,’ you’re going to have a bad time. However, if your company can have the focus and flexibility to design for the platform’s constraints instead of around them, beautiful things can happen,” says Bloyd.

He concludes by stating, “Focusing simultaneously on multiple platforms is difficult and often frustrating. But, it’s what I’ve always done, and I find it very rewarding.”

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Game technology and development company NaturalMotion has raised $11 million from venture capital group Benchmark in a second round of funding. It will use part of the investment to open a U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, Calif.’s SoMa district, which is also home to competing mobile developers Gree and Zynga.

If you’ve played major console releases like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed or developer Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption, and Max Payne 3, you’ve seen NaturalMotion’s tech in action. Its Euphoria engine creates animations that simulate body movement rather than relying on premade clips, so characters move and react realistically when you shoot or Force-push them.

NaturalMotion, founded in 2001, currently employs 130 people in offices in Oxford, London and San Francisco. In 2010, it opened NaturalMotion Games to bring its innovations to mobile devices.

“We realized the iPhone was becoming fast enough to run our technology, and we founded NaturalMotion Games [to] create mobile social games that combine console quality with mobile usage patterns,” company chief Torsten Reil said in a statement to GamesBeat. “We focus on ultra-high-quality 3D visuals and compelling characters and [gameplay], and our first six games have all been global Top Ten App Store chart successes.”

NaturalMotion’s games include a mobile version of Parker Brothers’ block-stacking game Jenga and football titles like NFL Rivals and Backbreaker. Its first free-to-play iOS game, the equine ownership sim My Horse, launched in September 2011 and has generated over 10 million downloads.

Moving forward, all of NaturalMotion’s games will be free-to-play. “We love the ability to reach that many people and the sustained revenue profile,” Reil said.

The NaturalMotion chief also says that 3D graphics are the future of mobile development and that the company’s continued focus on visual technology will ensure its success.

“We believe that creating rich, believable visual experiences is becoming the key differentiator in mobile social games,” Reil said. “Animated movies had their Toy Story movement, which meant the end of the previously dominant 2D films, and mobile games will go through the same transition. We’ve seen early evidence of this with our My Horse game — the download numbers and engagement have been off-the-scale for us.”

You can read the full press release here.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

The deal gives Kabam more development firepower and it is generally part of a wave of acquisitions happening in the game industry as social game makers try to bulk up in order to stay competitive with market leader Zynga. Kabam has raised $125 million — a huge amount of money for a social game publisher — and now it has begun to spend it.

The deal adds six employees to Kabam’s roster of 450 people. Fearless Studios is led by award-winning writer and game director Haden Blackman (pictured left) and technology leader Cedrick Collomb (pictured right). Blackman is the creator and senior executive producer of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Collomb was formerly director of engineering at LucasArts. As such, they’re an example of traditional hardcore game developers who have made the leap to social games.

“The Fearless Studios team brings a wealth of talent and experience in creating outstanding, highly successful AAA titles across a range of genres,” said Kevin Chou, CEO of Kabam. “Their skills in game design, emerging technologies and proficiency in making the transition from 2D to 3D on consoles mesh perfectly with Kabam’s strategy. We’ll significantly strengthen our industry leadership as the online gaming market transitions to higher fidelity, 3D gameplay with our acquisition of Fearless Studios.”

Redwood City, Calif.-based Kabam makes hardcore games on Facebook. The company has about 2.4 million monthly active users on Facebook, down significantly from 12.9 million in August, according to AppData. By acquiring a promising studio, Kabam could help stage its comeback.

Kabam has also invested heavily in games for other platforms. It has launched The Godfather: Five Families on Google+ and its own Kabam.com web site.The Godfather game is Kabam’s first branded title and it’s an example of the company’s ambitions to make high-quality games in the future.

Blackman has a knack for creating compelling stories, memorable characters and accessible gameplay. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed had all of those characteristics and it was one of the best-selling Star Wars games of all time, winning an award from the Writers Guild of America for best video game writing. Collomb has developed the technological backbone of many of LucasArts’ biggest games and helped harmonize Lucas’s game and film technologies into one development pipeline.

“There’s no way we could pass up the chance to marry our vision for creating story-driven action games with Kabam’s excellence in building great online franchises using their incredible infrastructure, distribution ability, and advanced analytics,” said Blackman. “Joining the hardcore social gaming leader gives our team a once in a lifetime opportunity to forge a new paradigm for what players can experience in an online game.”

Kabam was founded in 2007 as Watercooler and funded by Betfair and Canaan Partners. It had around 20 employees for quite a while as it experimented on Facebook, making sports fan pages and sports games. It had a big hit with its first major role-playing game, Kingdoms of Camelot, which quickly pulled in millions of users. The game still has 1.5 million monthly active users 19 months after its launch. Kabam also acquired WonderHill, a San Francisco game company that developed Dragons of Atlantis, which has become Kabam’s most successful game to date. The company has raised multiple rounds to date.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---