Cinemaware: История Взлётов и Падений Игровой Компании

Video game developer

Cinemaware expanded to sports games, with its "TV Sports" line, which featured elements of sports telecasts such as studio announcers. The "TV Sports" line covered basketball, ice hockey, and football. Some of the titles were only known by the generic name "TV Sports" in Europe such asTV Sports: Boxing and TV Sports: Baseball, which were released in the United States by Data East as ABC Wide World of Sports Boxing and Bo Jackson Baseball, respectively. In 1989, the company debuted its Spotlight Software label in order to release foreign titles for the American market, most notably Speedball. By 1990, the NEC owned 15% of Cinemaware. Cinemaware went bankrupt in 1991. While porting S. D. I. to another system, one of the company's owners demanded the programmers add more features, increasing the programming time and delaying the product's release. Coupled with falling sales of their other titles amid an economic downturn, the company suffered. The company also suffered from software piracy, threatening to stop publishing Amiga games at several points because of the ease by which video games could be copied. Many of their games, including Wings, were cracked and spread amongst gamers before release.

Lars Fuhrken Batista later bought the Cinemaware trademark and associated intellectual property, founding Cinemaware Inc. in 2000. Cinemaware developed recreations of its past titles, updated for Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh. Dubbed the "Digitally Remastered" editions, these games feature the same gameplay as the originals, but with updated graphics. They also ported some of their older games to handheld systems, such as the Game Boy Advance. On their website, they have also released disk images of their original titles for use with emulators and some are emulated via Macromedia Shockwave. The new Cinemaware developed newer versions of their classic games. Their first game in this endeavor was Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown, featuring an improved 3D engine and was released in September 2003 for Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. Since the 1.02 patch for Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown in December 2003, Cinemaware has made no official announcements for its other games. One developer made a statement in the website's forums in October 2004 stating Cinemaware is still working on these projects, but no other announcements have been made since.

On October 6, 2005, Cinemaware was acquired by predominantly family oriented game publisher eGames, Inc., and Lars Furken Batista became Vice President of Development.

In January 2024, Lithuanian game developer and publisher Nordcurrent acquired all Cinemaware intellectual property rights from Starbreeze. The company states that this aligns with the company's vision to establish its division Nordcurrent Labs in the PC and console games publishing sector.