Games Toaster

Kapooki Games feature on GD.ie

Kapooki Games is the focus of the latest feature article on Gamedevelopers.ie. The feature highlights the back-story of how the former Irish games developer went into liquidation in 2005, with debts of over 700,000 euro...

How a small start-up studio, located over a tattoo parlour in Dublin, went from being one of Ireland’s brightest game development hopes to another casualty of a ruthless industry. Pavel Barter reunites Dave Stafford, Shane Whelan, Gearoid Coughlan, and Ger Lawlor, of Kapooki Games. - gamedevelopers.ie

Directory: Producers

Games Toaster’s Irish Computer Games Directory 

PHASE ONE: Developers, Publishers, and Middleware Providers
After vastly expanding our news archive’s category tags, the following is the first phase of Games Toaster’s Irish Computer Games Directory.

Part one coverers producers (developers, publishers, and middleware providers etc). This first phase, like what is to come, will be dynamic; but also contains historic entrees.

The directory comes after many years of looking at the idea of a database or similar. It is planned to expand from producers to every area of computer games in Ireland.

NOTE: While every reasonable effort has been made to make sure all information is accuracy, we can not guarantee such. Please send error reports to [email protected]. Other information is welcome at [email protected]. As always, we can not take responsible for other websites. Research sources: Company Registration Office, Dublin; Google;  companies’ websites; GameDevelopers.ie.

Kapooki Games set for liquidation

Dublin-based games developer, Kapooki Games, is to be liquidated with debts of 700,000 euro, according to today’s Sunday Business Post.

Kapooki were hiring game testers at the end of last year, and was developing two games for PC and console - ‘Big Top’ was one such title. They were close to completing a title, initially for PC and later on console. The company also had developed mobile phone games, and non-games related marketing applications.

Michael Griffin, a founder of Kapooki, left the company around May of this year due to personal issues. At the time, Dave Stafford the firm’s art director and co-founder had taken up the CEO duties.

The Sunday Business Post says that the firm is ‘understood’ to have run out of funds in the past three months. A liquidator was appointed at a creditors' meeting last week.

North West developer - mini-game, due to start on full game

Torc Interactive, the Donegal/Derry based games developer and middleware company, is set for a busy year. Expecting to release a mini-game with the computer processor manufacture AMD early this year, starting work on a full game of their own later in the year, and on the middleware side of things, fully reveal their ‘Instinct’ game engine at the Game Developer Conference (GDC).

The showing of their tech demo at last year’s GDC lead to the developer being noticed, and then to the making of the first person mini-game with AMD, named ‘Dreadnought’. It is set on nuclear warship out at on a stormy sea; Torc proposes to include “a unique sense of realism and depth”.