Tantalus Interactive

Tantalus Media

Type	Proprietary limited company
Industry	Computer and video games
Founded	1994
Founder	Andrew Bailey, Trevor Nuriden, Arthur Kakouris
Headquarters	Melbourne, Australia
Key people	Tom Crago, CEO Joss Ellis, Director of Development
Products	See complete products listing
Number of employees	20 to 30 contractors
Website	http://www.tantalus.com.au/

Tantalus Media (formerly Tantalus Interactive) is an Australian video game developer based in Melbourne, Australia, founded in 1994 by former Beam Software programmers Trevor Nuridin, Tim Bennett and Andrew Bailey. In the mid 90's Tantalus was partly owned by UK developer Perfect Entertainment, which secured contracts with Psygnosis for ports of their popular PlayStation games to the Sega Saturn. During this time Tantalus was known as Tantalus Entertainment, but reverted to Tantalus Interactive after they became independent when separating from Perfect in 1998. The company changed its name to Tantalus Media in 2007 following investment from private equity company Netus. In 2010 following the completion of the DS & PSP title Megamind: The blue defender, CEO Tom Crago re-acquired the business from Netus.

Tantalus Media are best known for licensed platform conversions and have created over 40 games for the Xbox, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and PC, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, and iOS.

Their first original title was South Park Rally, completed for four platforms in just 7 months. Their first handheld game was ATV Quad Power Racing for the Game Boy Advance, and they released Space Race, their first PS2 game, that same year. They used two cross-platform engines: CRIS for handhelds, with skinned mesh rendering, and the Mercury Engine for new generation consoles in its early years.