Swen Vincke

Larian Studios

Type	Video game studio
Industry	Interactive entertainment
Founded	1996
Founder	Swen Vincke
Headquarters	Ghent, Belgium
Products	Divinity series
Number of employees	40
Website	larian.com

Larian Studios is a Belgian game developer which was founded in 1996 by Swen Vincke. It currently focuses on developing role-playing video game and educational games, apart from LEDWars which is a hardcore strategy game and a number of casino games.

Larian's first project was called The Lady, the Mage and the Knight. However, they were unable to gain the recognition of any publishers as none believed they were capable of creating a game. In order to rectify this and to prove them wrong, they developed LED Wars, a strategy game that was developed within 5 months and published by Ionos in 1997. As a result, The Lady, the Mage and the Knight soon evolved into a collaborative project between Larian Studios and Attic Entertainment Software. Due to various problems between the two development studios and its publisher, the project was abandoned in 1999.

In 2002, Larian completed work on Divinity: Sword of Lies which was published under the name Divine Divinity by CDV. In 2004, Beyond Divinity, the expansion to Divine Divinity, was published in two editions: the standard version by Ubisoft Entertainment GmbH and the deluxe version by MediaMix Benelux which contained Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity and a novella by Rhianna Pratchett called "Son of Chaos".

Also in 2004, KetnetKick, an educational game, was developed for Ketnet and released by Transposia. In 2006, Beyond Divinity was re-released under Gold Games 9 by Ubisoft Entertainment which was a set of 10 games on 6 DVDs.

In March 2008, Adventure Rock, an online virtual world was completed and released. This was followed by the release of KetnetKick 2 in October 2008 by VRT, the national broadcaster in Belgium. In March 2009, GulliLand was published by Jeunesse TV, a French national broadcasting channel. In January 2010, Larian released Divinity II: Ego Draconis - the sequel to Divine Divinity - to the U.S. market on Xbox 360 and Windows simultaneously, after releases in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia and Benelux. Larian has also produced Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance, and built a Gold Deluxe version that holds all Divinity II episodes, called Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga.