|
Shiny Entertainment is a software house based on Newport Beach, CA responsible for several hits since their establishment by Dave Perry in 1993.
Perry, already a experienced developer, established Shiny Entertainment two years after leaving London for the United States, signed a publishing deal with Playmates Interactive Entertainment, and after showing the early prototypes of what would become Earthworm Jim got immediate praise from the press and the industry alike. The game was released one year later, and received several Game of the year, giving Shiny one unusually high profile dispite being a still young company.
The sequel, Earthworm Jim 2 (released in 1995) improved on the first game formula, and proved to be a second hit for Shiny, who would be acquired by Interplay in the same year.
The third hit, MDK was released for personal computers in 1997, and proved what intelligent coding could do instead of pushing the hardware to improve performance. Graphically, the game was on the edge of what could be done without using hardware acceleration (which Perry was not very sympathetic), and combined with good gameplay, it was of no surprise it peaked the charts in 10 countries.
However, MDK was the last game to please both the market and the press: Earthworm Jim 3D (1999) was universally panned, and Messiah (2000) was eagerly awaited by fans, but only got average attention from the market. The exception was Sacrifice (2000), altough at a considerably smaller level of the one set by Earthworm Jim in 1994.
In 2002 they were bought by Infogrames (now Atari) in a US$ 47M deal. Having bought the license for The Matrix in 1999, by the 10th anniversary of the company, Enter The Matrix was released. It was one of the most expensive titles ever (at a reported cost of US$ 30M), and turned to be one of the best selling titles of 2003, altough most reviews were not favourable.
External links
| 
