Westwood Studios
More info
- Creator
- Brett Sperry, Louis Castle
- Released
- 1985
- Type
- Game developer
The Las Vegas studio that wrote the template for real-time strategy and was then shut down by its owner.
Brett Sperry and Louis Castle founded Westwood in Las Vegas in 1985. With Dune II in 1992 the studio assembled what became the standard real-time strategy recipe: gather resources, build a base, select units with the mouse and roll over the opponent. Command & Conquer in 1995 turned the recipe into a bestseller, with full-motion video cutscenes and LAN play that kept offices running well past closing time.
Virgin bought the studio in 1992 and sold it to Electronic Arts in 1998. EA closed Westwood in 2003 and moved the remaining staff to California, a pattern studios like Origin Systems already knew well. Blizzard carried the recipe on into Warcraft and beyond.