Black Widow Games
Black Widow Games was a video game developer specializing in promotional mods for Quake and Half-Life 3D engines. They are best known for their They Hunger series. Prominent members included Neil Manke, Einar Saukas, and Magnus Jansén. The company business model is based on developing contract-work mods for the marketing campaigns of customer companies and products, freely distributed for promotion.
History
Founded in 1997 to produce contractual mods for state of the art 3D game engines, Black Widow Games would release 14 games between their first mod, Soldier Of Fortune, and 2003. Notable releases included the Half Life spin-off, USS Darkstar, and the They Hunger series. They Hunger in particular generated extensive player discussion and was considered an example of good gameplay within the realm of [List of Half-Life (video game)|Half-Life mods|Half-Life mods]. To promote the 2003 film Underworld, Sony Pictures commissioned Black Widow Games a promotional tie-in mod titled Underworld: Bloodline. The mod was available on Sony Pictures' official website until the end of 2007 and remains the only officially licensed Half-Life mod tied to a Hollywood film.In October 2005, the company declared it was not possible anymore to produce full-fledged single player mods working on low budget promotional projects within reduced development cycles, because of the higher level of detail required for modern 3D engines. At this time, the company revealed it had been secretly developing for almost a year its first commercial game They Hunger: Lost Souls, based on the Half-Life 2 Source engine, a successor to their popular Half-Life survival horror mod, They Hunger, which Black Widow Software had created in 1999 and released as a bonus with copies of the PC Gamer magazine. It would feature a plotline revolving around a zombie outbreak in northeastern Europe in the 1960s. Apart from a detailed plotline and a few developers' screenshots, however, little information has been released about the game since 2005. Sparse updates have been published over the years at the company's official website and in a few specialized game magazines, and the final product is expected to be released via Steam. Drawing some comparisons to vaporware titles, Planet Half-Life announced on April 1, 2007 that They Hunger: Lost Souls had again been redesigned and was set for release as a Nintendo DS game.
In November 2008, the developers of the Sven Co-op mod announced that they had been working with Black Widow Games to develop a co-op version of They Hunger, which was later released as an addon to be played in the mod in December 2008.
Releases
Mods
- Jan. 1997: Dark Night
- Feb. 1997: Outpost
- Mar. 1997: Monastery
- Apr. 1997: SlaughterHouse
- Jul. 1997: Alba 1
- Jul. 1997: Alba 2
- Aug. 1997: Starship
- Nov. 1997: Starship II
- 1997: Silhouette Of Darkness
- Special Ops Force: Deathmatch
- SlaughterShip
- 1999: They Hunger
- They Hunger Deathmatch 1-5
- 2003: ''Abandoned Factory''
Contract-work mods
- Oct. 1997: Soldier of Fortune
- Dec. 1997: Soldier of Fortune: Deathmatch
- Apr. 1998: Soldier of Fortune: Mission 2
- Jul. 1998: Coconut Monkey: Paradise Lost
- Sep. 1998: Special Ops Force: Mission 3 -- Desert Bloom
- Oct. 1998: Coconut Monkey: Dry Gulch
- Dec. 1998: Special Ops Force: Mission 4 -- Cold as Ice
- Jan. 1999: Coconut Monkey: Saving Private Monkey
- Aug. 1999: USS Darkstar
- Sep. 2000: They Hunger 2: Rest in Pieces
- Nov. 2000: Vidar's Niflheim
- Jun. 2001: They Hunger 3: Rude Awakening
- Sep. 2003: '' Underworld: Bloodline''