Westwood Studios was one of the defining PC developers of the 1990s, the Las Vegas studio that helped turn real-time strategy into a mainstream phenomenon. Brett Sperry and Louis Castle met in Las Vegas in late 1983 while both were working as contract programmers, and in 1985 they founded a company together as Brelous Software. Within two months it became Westwood Associates, a name Castle credited to the "entertainment meets professional" character of the Westwood neighborhood in Los Angeles, with "Associates" added to stress that great games take a team. The early years ran on contract work, porting 8-bit titles to 16-bit systems such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST for Epyx and Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), and those proceeds funded original design. Mars Saga, developed for Electronic Arts, arrived in 1988, and BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Revenge laid groundwork for the real-time strategy genre with its real-time tactical combat. Eye of the Beholder (1991), a real-time Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game made for SSI, became one of the studio's first great successes, and Virgin Games acquired the company in 1992, renaming it Westwood Studios. A team once known for shipping late had by 1993 earned a name for delivering on schedule and, in Computer Gaming World's words, "a reputation for good product," on the strength of Eye of the Beholder, The Legend of Kyrandia and Dune II, with Lands of Lore following in the same era.
Westwood's greatest commercial success began in 1995 with Command & Conquer. Building on the gameplay and interface ideas of Dune II, it added pre-rendered 3D sprites, video cinematics, a pop and rock soundtrack with techno elements streamed from disk, and online play, and the series that followed earned a Guinness World Records listing for 30 million copies sold worldwide. In August 1998 Electronic Arts acquired Westwood, together with sister company Burst Studios, for $122.5 million as part of its purchase of Virgin Interactive's North American operations. At that point Westwood's games held a 5 to 6 percent share of the PC market, and the studio worked from a 50,000 square foot Las Vegas building with its own motion capture facilities. Sperry worked to keep the two corporate cultures separate, but after Command & Conquer: Renegade and Earth & Beyond fell short of EA's expectations, the publisher announced in January 2003 that Westwood would be merged into EA Los Angeles, and the studio closed for good on March 31, 2003. Its people carried the craft forward, with former staff founding Petroglyph Games in Las Vegas that April and Sperry later co-founding Jet Set Games in 2008. The work itself endures in Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection, which gathers Westwood's run from the original Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations through Red Alert with Counterstrike and The Aftermath, Tiberian Sun and Firestorm, Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge (built with Westwood Pacific), and the shooter spin-off Renegade - the games that set the pace for a generation of strategy on PC.
