Machine Zone
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Formerly called
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| Private | |
| Industry | |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founder |
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| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, United States |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Products | |
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Number of employees
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550 (as of October 2015[update]) |
| Divisions | Platform |
| Subsidiaries | Epic War LLC |
| Website | mz |
Machine Zone, Inc. (MZ) is a privately held technology company, founded in 2008 and based in Palo Alto, California. The company is best known for its widely advertised freemium mobile MMO strategy games Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike, which have both simultaneously been ranked among the top ten highest-grossing mobile games.
The company, which was originally called Addmired, was founded in 2008. In 2012, Addmired changed its name to Machine Zone, after raising $8 million in funding from Menlo Ventures. The company rebranded itself as MZ in 2016.
Gabriel Leydon, currently the CEO, founded the company with partners Mike Sherrill and current Chief Technology Officer Halbert Nakagawa. It was among the participants in Y Combinator's Winter 2008 Accelerator program for startups.
The company got its start making AddHer and AddHim, a pair of MySpace widgets that TechCrunch called "a Hot or Not-esque social network plugin." Addmired later pivoted into the free-to-play game space, releasing 13 games between 2009 and 2012, including the iOS games Original Gangstaz, iMob and iMob 2, and Global War Riot.
Machine Zone released Game of War: Fire Age in July 2013. According to VentureBeat, Leydon had used the 2012 venture funding to "bet everything on Game of War," putting a team of 80 people on an 18-month project to design and build a complex real-time strategy game, including creation of a messaging infrastructure and language translation layer that would allow worldwide participation in the game's alliances and chat.
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