St Patrick's Day - The Irish connection to Gaming

In honour of Saint Patrick, the most Irish of Saints, we have a look at the relation between games and Ireland.

Game Developers

Gambrinous

A tiny indie studio from Dublin, Ireland. Developers of Guild of Dungeoneering.

Guild of Dungeoneering is a turn-based dungeon crawler with a twist: instead of controlling the hero you build the dungeon around him. Using cards drawn from your Guild decks you lay down rooms, monsters, traps and of course loot!

Check it out on the Steam Store

Good Man Lads

A tiny indie studio from Dublin, Ireland. Working on Floaty Ball.

Floaty Ball is a local multiplayer head stomping action/platforming game.
Check it out on Steam Greenlight

Software

Havok

Havok is a software company based in Dublin, Ireland once bought by intel and now owned by Microsoft.

We've all seen the Havok Logo at the start of games.

They have partnership with Activision, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Bethesda Softworks and Ubisoft. Havok’s technology has been used in more than 150 game titles including Half-Life 2, Dark Souls, The ELder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 to name a few.

It is a cross platform technology for most systems. Havok produces the dynamics driving for Autodesk 3ds Max.

Demonware

Demonware is an Irish software development company that was bought out and is now a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard.

• Demonware produces:
  • "Demonware State Engine" a framework that eliminates the need to reinvent netcode in multiplayer games.
  • "Matchmaking+" a service for multiplayer games for matchmaking, user profiling and statistics. It is used in the Call of Duty series and is its main product.

Games set in Ireland

Clive Barker's Undying

The game is a first person shooter survival horror game released in 2001. Based around the character of an Irish adventurer, Patrick Galloway.

Check it out on gog.com