Troika Games
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| Troika Games | |
 |
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| Type | Privately held |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1998 (defunct 2005) |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California |
| Key people | Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky & Jason Anderson |
| Industry | Computer and video games |
| Products | Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, The Temple of Elemental Evil & Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines |
Troika Games was a computer game developer focused on computer role-playing games. It was founded in 1998 by three key members of the team behind the popular RPG Fallout: Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, after they left Interplay.
The company released three games: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (set in a steampunk/fantasy world), The Temple of Elemental Evil (based on a classic 1985 Dungeons & Dragons adventure) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (based on White Wolf Game Studio's Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game). An interesting note is that the Russian word Troika means 'three of any kind'; the company went out of business after releasing three games. Bloodlines was the first game to license Valve Software's Source engine, released on the same day as Half-Life 2.
While Troika was lauded by critics and gamers alike for their high quality storytelling and open game design, allowing players a great deal of freedom in how to approach quests and obstacles in their games, the company has also been criticised for the large number of bugs which plagued both Temple and Bloodlines. Nonetheless, the company enjoyed an excellent reputation among RPG gamers.
Arcanum, Troika's first release, was the most technically solid when it landed in Fall 2001, and it offered an eventually engrossing story and gameplay. The company was able to leverage positive critical response, but the public never responded in large numbers, a problem that would plague the company up until its eventual demise, on top of apparently poor QA (quality assurance). It followed up with Temple in 2003. The combination of the D&D license, a beloved module, and Troika created a lot of buzz, but the title as released was generally regarded as both incomplete and loaded with bugs. Atari, their publisher for this title (previously known as Infogrames before they purchased "Atari" as its official game division label), has had its share of financial ups and downs, and some speculated that the game was prematurely released as an attempt to recoup development costs and shore up their quarterly financial reports. Several official patches have been released since, but the problem of overtly missing content remains.
Bloodlines was released on November 16, 2004, and was hailed as a deep and engrossing RPG with signature storytelling and dialogue, but was critically derailed as failing to fully utilize the Source Engine and the bugs upon the game's release. Many aspects that made the Source Engine very useful, namely the physics engine and visuals, were not fully presented in Bloodlines, but other aspects were, namely lip synching and facial animations. After the eventual demise of the company and the halt of official patches being released, the community took up the reigns of supporting Bloodlines and to this day, the unofficial patch is up to version 3.1 (released on October 20, 2006) [1].
In early 2005, Troika ran into financial trouble, and was eventually forced to lay off all its staff and begin selling assets. Troika's founders have stated, however, that it is possible that the company will eventually "regroup" but unlikely. Ex-Troika staff have been picked up by the following companies: Activision, Day One Studios, Mythic Entertainment, Obsidian Entertainment, Point of View, Seven Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, Swingin' Ape, Turtle Rock, and Treyarch.
[edit] External links
- Their Official website is no longer online. You can however find an archived version here on Terra-Arcanum (A Troika Games fansite).
- Troika Games profile on MobyGames
