Guild Software, Inc is an award-winning independent game developer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded in 1998, the company has continually pursed the cutting edge in large-scale multiplayer environments. Developing a completely proprietary MMO engine from scratch, this culminated in the 2004 major retail launch of our first title, Vendetta Online™. A relatively early entry into the MMO genre, this title has helped break ground in a few areas:
- With the debut of our public alpha in May of 2002, VO was an earlier example of a persistent massively multiplayer title to support a truly realtime "twitch" combat model (no virtual dice-rolling). In an era when modems were still commonplace, this was a non-trivial technical achievement. (titles such as Air Warrior from 1986 were far earlier, but lacked much of the scale and world persistency of modern MMOs).
- VO included completely multi-platform support at the time of launch, with the retail CD offering installations for Windows, MacOS X and Linux (with Linux support prominently featured on the box). To this day the title supports Mac Universal (PowerPC and Intel), both 64 and 32bit Linux, and Windows XP through Windows 7. These ports are all native, unlike many of our contemporaries who use emulation libraries on Mac and Linux, if they support them at all.
- In October of 2008, after several years of custom development, we launched the Player Contribution Corps, a system by which individual players may directly contribute game content to the Vendetta Online universe. Still a somewhat controversial topic amongst MMO designers today, our PCC system was one of the first to allow this kind of community-driven development in a title based around a canonical in-game backstory.
Although mainly known for multi-platform PC development, Guild Software is also an authorized Nintendo Wii and DS/DSi developer, and has history on low-resource platforms like mobile phones and the GameBoy Color. We intend to use this experience to help us expand into the emerging smartphone, smartbook, and mobile console markets, which we see as a new world for online gaming.