Noxu Game Studios
 Logo since 2015 | |
Formerly | Norup-Starek Games (1992–2006) |
|---|---|
| Private | |
| Industry | Video games Digital distribution |
| Founded | March 15, 1992 |
| Founders | Nicklas Norup & Wisław Starek |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Nicklas Norup (CEO & President) Wisław Starek (CEO & Studio Director) |
| Products | Emperor, Tremendum, Grateful Dead, Fatal Deception and Kinetic game series Virulent Engine NoxuLauncher |
| Owner | Nicklas Norup (50%) Wisław Starek (50%) |
Number of employees | 382 (2022) |
Noxu Game Studios is a Littish video game developer founded in 1992 by Nicklas Norup and Wisław Starek. The company is most famous for its Tremendum series as well as titles such as Grateful Dead, Fatal Deception and Kinetic. Noxu Game Studios also created the Virulent game engine and the NoxLauncher game and community service.
History
Founding and Early Years (1992-1996)
Noxu Game Studios was originally founded as Norup-Starek Games in 1992 by the friends Nicklas Norup and Wisław Starek. Both of them had worked for many years at NordSoft but were laid off in 1991 as the Littish economy started to stagnate. They founded the company as they saw a gap in the Littish video game market, that there barely were any, and started to work on their first game Implex in August 1993, after buying access to the Square game engine. Implex was a moderate success, receiving mixed ratings but had good commercial sales. Implex is a futuristic puzzle game, where the player must try to escape a high security prison facility to gain their freedom. It is looked upon fondly by its fans and has an active modding community in part thanks to its charm and unique art style.
During the development of Implex, Starek noted how sluggish working with the Square engine felt and expressed to Norup the need for a new engine for future games. Over a weekend in 1993, they sketched out the infrastructure and internal logic of a new game engine and spent the next 2 years developing it, almost going bankrupt in the process. In 1995, the Virulent game engine was finished and the now 15 employee company now started work on the first game using their own in-house engine. In March 1996 Emperor released to overwhelming praise and commercial success. Emperor was unlike any games of its time as the player took control of a small tribe in the stone age and advanced all the way to space colonization. Many critics pointed out the endless possibilities of the game, as most of the games content was procedurally generated, as well as the games art style, which in part was thanks to the shader technology of the Virulent engine.
Tremendum and Grateful Dead (1996-2006)
Following the success of Emperor, Norup-Starek Games expanded to 46 employees and started work on a sequel. Emperor II was released in 1998 and had many new features, most notably online multiplier games, this was thanks to an upgrade to the Virulent engine that allowed to multiplayer and online functionality. This online functionality allowed to release of an expansion to Emperor II in 1999 called New Horizons which expanded the space age part of the game tremendously and was received well by critics. Norup was fascinated by these new online possibilities and proposed a purely online multiplayer game focused on teamwork and skill based gameplay, following input from Starek and other team members, the design concept for Tremendum was finalized in early 2000. Tremendum would be a radically different game from previous Emperor titles, being a First Person Shooter with a heavy emphasis on movement, positioning and precision in a purely online experience.
Tremendum was released on 17 September 2002 to critical acclaim. Many critics praised the game for its fast paced gameplay, unique weapon selection, online experience and overall quality and polish. Tremendum won 6 "Game of the Year" Awards and is considered the birth of the movement shooter genre by many. The game is set on a futuristic Eurth being invaded by an alien species called the Xenos, over 60% of the human population has been killed and the rest have formed into a faction called The Vanguard who are fighting the Xenos for the future of Eurth. The games practice/offline mode tells part of this story while the online gameplay sees players pick one of these two factions, each with unique weaponry and designs. Tremendum would receive an expansion called Tremendum: Last Stand on 10 April 2003 which could be downloaded from the newly launched Noxu Game Launcher, later renamed to NoxuLauncher.
During 2003 the company underwent an internal reorganization and further expanded to 78 employees. There were discussions of letting the company go public, allowing its stocks to be traded on the stock market, but these never materialized. Instead the company split into different development teams. Team A, lead by Nicklas Norup and consisting of more senior members would work on a sequel to Tremendum while Team B, lead by Wisław Starek would begin work on a new project called Scale. Scale would prove to be a massive undertaking and after Team A released Tremendum II in 2004 to a lukewarm reception, the whole company was focus on Scale, now called Grateful Dead which would release on 5 June 2005 to massive success. Grateful Dead was once again unlike any other game developed by the company before, being an open-world role playing game with the player creating their own character and exploring the huge world of Oradia, uncovering lost cities, mystical creatures and intricate court politics. The game was called "one of the best games of all time" by some reviewers. The release of Grateful Dead would launch the company to international fame as the game became an global success, selling over 11 million units worldwide.
Expansion (2006-2015)
In 2006 Norup-Starek Games was reincorporated as Noxu Game Studios after moving to their new, and current offices, in Halling. New internal development studios were set up to work on multiple games at the same time and the company reached 128 employees. These teams could freely move between each other allowing for a flexible development process and many prototypes would be made using this system over the years, although few of them would be made into complete games. These teams made several expansions to Grateful Dead, The Old Gods in 2006, The Fallen Rise in 2007 and Fate of Einarheim in 2008. In 2009 Tremendum III was released, meant to revitialize the series after the mixed response to Tremendum II. Tremendum III saw massive leaps in graphical fidelity and had an online ranked competitive mode as well as a singleplayer campaign about group of marines fighting the Xenos before the formation of The Vanguard, making the game a prequel to previous entries. An expansion was released in 2010 called United Force which shows the formation of The Vanguard.
The fascination the company has had with First Person Shooters showed through as Fatal Deception was released in 2013. Being a modern military first person shooter, Fatal Deception places the player in the shoes of Captain Louis, who is stranded in enemy territory as part of a special operation. The player has to escape back to friendly forces using a combination of stealth mechanics and overwhelming firepower in a unique mix between bombastic combat and eerie stealth. On the way back to friendly forces the player will discover that a WMD is about to land in the hand of terrorists and so the player is presented with the choice of continuing back to friendly lines to get help with stopping the terrorists, or going by themselves, these are effectively an easy and hard, difficulty selection as the end of the game doesn't change.
Acquisitions (2015-Present)
In 2015 Noxu Game Studios rebranded and got a new logo. Betwen 2015 and 2018 Noxu Game Studios acquired six smaller Littish game companies and formed them into a new development team called Noxu Violet who have since been working on a still unannounced project. During these acquisitions rumors began to surface that the company would go public and bought these smaller companies to increase their potential market worth, these rumors are still unconfirmed. In 2018 Kinetic was launched as a free to play online RTS-FPS hybrid. Kinetic sees two teams of 12 players battle it out in an abandoned space station above Eurth, one player can take the position of Space Commander and unlock new weapons, vehicles or upgrades for the rest of their teams. The Space Commander can be changed during the match so the player isnt locked in the position. In the first month Kinetic saw over 140.000 downloads and already several ranked competitions between Clans on NoxuLauncher has been created. In 2020 Noxu Game Studios announced Tremendum IV for a Q4 2022 release and that Fatal Deception 2 was in development.
As of 2021 Noxu has four internal development teams and 382 employees.
| Studio Name | Studio Lead | Project | Employees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Noxu Gold | Kristian Kałuża | Tremendum IV | 104 |
| Noxu Crimson | Magnus Jensen | Fatal Deception 2 | 120 |
| Noxu Cyan | Gabe Richard | Kinetic Expansion | 62 |
| Noxu Violet | Lina Ashworth | Unannounced | 96 |
Virulent Game Engine
The Virulent Engine is the proprietary video game engine used by Noxu Game Studios in all of their games since 1995 although it has seen many upgrades and modifications since then. The most noteworthy engine upgrades have been: Online Functionality (1998), Advanced Physics and Collisions (2002), Branching Dialogue System (2005) and Real Time Dynamic Lighting (2013). Virulent is considered one of the most advanced game engines by many developers and a public software development kit was released in 2007, allowing for dedicated modding and content creation for each Virulent game.
The Virulent engine was born out of the frustration of using the Square engine as said by CEO and Studio Director Wisław Starek in a 2015 interview:
The development of Implex was a nightmare. The Square engine, although advanced for its time and easy to gain access too, was so sluggish and slow to work in. Many of the problems of Implex, such as bugs, movement issues and others are because we couldn't fully fix them in that freaking engine. That is why I said to Nicklas we should use something else for the next game, because like hell I would develop in that engine again. That's how Virulent was born. We spent a weekend in 1993 sketching out what a new engine should have and by the end we had made our own engine, we decided to make this new engine if we wanted to continue making games. We named it Virulent as it means "bitterly hostile", which was how we felt towards the Square engine.
NoxuLauncher
Norup-Starek Games launched the Noxu Game Launcher in 2003. It was launched together with the release of the Tremendum: Last Stand expansion and was first used to deliver patches and other updates to Norup-Starek Games's online games as well as allowing users to buy and download Tremendum and its expansion. Within the first month the Noxu Game Launcher had over registered 10.000 users. The service crashed, experienced outages and bugs at launch due to the larger than expected user base. These problems were fixed in the following weeks. In 2007 the NoxuLauncher got an update which allowed for free downloads of the Virulent SDKs mod tools, as well as being able to integrate these mods into their respective game. This update also introduced the Clan section, users could form a clan and have discussions, share screenshots and videos and use their Clan tag on their profile. The Clan system also allowed for inter-Clan tournaments to be played in games that supported it such as Tremendum III (2009), Fatal Deception (2013) and Kinetic (2018).
As of December 2021 the NoxuLauncher has 12 million registered users.
List of Games Developed
| Franchise | First release | Sales (m) |
|---|---|---|
| Tremendum | 2002 | 26.4 |
| Fatal Deception | 2013 | 14.9 |
| Grateful Dead | 2005 | 11.6 |
| Emperor | 1996 | 6.2 |
| Name | Released | Expansions |
|---|---|---|
| Implex | 1993 | |
| Emperor | 1996 | |
| Emperor II | 1998 | New Horizons (1999) |
| Tremendum | 2002 | Last Stand (2003) |
| Tremendum II | 2004 | |
| Grateful Dead | 2005 | The Old Gods (2006) The Fallen Rise (2007) Fate of Einarheim (2008) |
| Tremendum III | 2009 | United Force (2010) |
| Fatal Deception | 2013 | Broken Arrow (2014) |
| Fatal Deception 2 | 2015 | Special Forces (2016) Extraction (2017) |
| Kinetic | 2018 | |
| Tremendum IV | Q4 2022 | |
| Fatal Deception 2 | TBA |