The First CD and EA’s Westwood Buyout (PCGH Retro, August 17)

The First CD and EA's Westwood Buyout (PCGH Retro, August 17)


from Carsten Spille etc –
Westwood buys the first CD and EA – this happened on August 17th. Every day, PC Games Hardware takes a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.

…1982: It is a revolution for the music market – and later for the computer world as well: On August 17, 1982, the PolyGram record company releases the world’s first audio CDs. The CDs include ABBA and Chopin waltzes. This marked the beginning of the triumph of this optical storage medium and the end of the record; however, the CD-ROM intended for computers, which largely superseded the floppy disk and made unimagined capacities available, was not developed until many years later.

…1998: Command & Conquer many of you have probably played or at least know the name of it. But the direct predecessor, Dune II, also offered the same game principle, just on Arrakis and with the houses Atreides, Harkonnen and the Ordos not known from Frank Herbert’s novel. Resource mining, unit management and base building – all of this was similar to the more well-known successor and so Westwood Studios, which Virgin Interactive is selling for 122.5 million US dollars this August 17th to media juggernaut Electronic Arts, can confidently do so credited with inventing the real-time strategy genre as we know it today. Although the two studio bosses Brett Sperry and Louie Castle receive five-year contracts with EA, a large part of the workforce goes their own way from now on – culminating in the studios Petroglyph Games and Jet Set Games, among other things. Before Command & Conquer and Dune II, Westwood was best known for the dungeon crawler Eye of the Beholder, the role-playing game series Lands of Lore and Legend of Kyrandia, and also the Battletech titles The Crescent Hawk’s Inception and The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge – both also with Borrowings from the later real-time principles.

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You can find more about this in our large Westwood Developer Special.

Reference-www.pcgameshardware.de