Quicksilver Software
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| Privately owned | |
| Industry | Interactive entertainment |
| Founded | May 1, 1984 |
| Headquarters | Irvine, California, United States |
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Key people
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William Fisher, Stephen Roney (Founders) |
| Website | www.quicksilver.com |
Quicksilver Software, Inc. was founded in 1984 by three Intellivision programmers from Mattel Electronics:William Fisher, Stephen Roney and Michael Breen. The company specializes in the creation of strategy, simulation, and educational products, and on focused high-technology R&D projects.
Early in its history, Quicksilver landed a productive deal with arcade-game manufacturer Data East USA, Inc. that ultimately resulted in the creation of 28 different titles for Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, and Atari ST home computers. These included adaptations of well-known games such as Karnov and the Ikari Warriors series.
The company’s work on another Data East title, Heavy Barrel, earned it the attention of publisher Interplay Productions, which contracted Quicksilver to develop what would become one of Interplay’s first titles as an independent publisher, Castles for the IBM PC, which ultimately sold more than 400,000 copies. This was followed by additional strategy titles such as Castles II, Conquest of the New World (over 500,000 copies), and Star Trek: Starfleet Command (over 300,000 copies and several sequels).
Quicksilver also established an active relationship with publisher Activision. Beginning with some research and development work on Activision’s digital video display technology, ultimately used in the top-selling title Return to Zork, Quicksilver rapidly expanded into developing a long series of four titles in the Shanghai line of tile-based solitaire games. Quicksilver also ported other titles for Activision, such as the Windows 3.1 and Mac OS versions of Zork: Nemesis and the DVD-ROM versions of Spycraft: The Great Game and Muppet Treasure Island.
At the same time, Quicksilver also worked on a series of educational software titles, such as the Math At Work line of math products and the highly acclaimed title Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, a massive 8.5-gigabyte interactive DVD-ROM version of the popular WNET television series. Quicksilver developed all of the underlying technology for Heritage, while the New York-based asset development team created the content for the game.
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