Astraware
Encyclopedia
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, Android OS, Microsoft Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft that was used in smartphones and Pocket PCs, but by 2011 was rarely supplied on new phones. The last version is "Windows Mobile 6.5.5"; it is superseded by Windows Phone, which does not run Windows Mobile software.Windows Mobile is...
and BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
smartphones. It is based in Knutton
Knutton
Knutton is an area in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. It lies between the town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and the village of Silverdale....
, Staffordshire
Staffordshire
Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...
.
Astraware was founded in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
by current CEO, Howard Tomlinson and Chief technical officer
Chief technical officer
A chief technology officer is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupant is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization....
, David Oakley in 1993. At that time they wrote software for the Atari ST
Atari ST
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...
. Their first successful software released was the DeskTracker tracker. This was followed by their first commercial success, their StormTracker music editor.
In 1995 Astraware released their first PC game called Bzzz! -- A game where you play a frog with insects buzzing around you and have to click on the insects to activate the frog's tongue to catch them for points and bonus combos.
1998 saw Astraware move to developing games for the Palm OS platform and saw the critically acclaimed Zap!2000 Shoot 'em up
Shoot 'em up
Shoot 'em up is a subgenre of shooter video games. In a shoot 'em up, the player controls a lone character, often in a spacecraft or aircraft, shooting large numbers of enemies while dodging their attacks. The genre in turn encompasses various types or subgenres and critics differ on exactly what...
game. It was one of the first colour games released on the Palm OS platform on the Palm IIIc
Palm IIIc
The Palm IIIc was the first colour PDA made by Palm, Inc. It ran Palm OS 3.5, the first Palm OS version to have native colour support and supported paletted 8-bit colour modes. The machine has a TFT LCD that is bright indoors, but almost unusable outdoors. The Palm IIIc features the classic...
.
In the Spring of 2000, Astraware was incorporated as Astraware Limited and Oakley and Tomlinson both left their jobs to concentrate on their new company.
They released the first two-player Bluetooth
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a proprietary open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks with high levels of security...
game, Biplane Ace after demoing it at the PalmSource developer conference in 2001.
Astraware's first licensed title was Bejeweled, a PopCap Games
PopCap Games
PopCap Games is an American video game developer and publisher, based in Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded in 2000 by John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka, and currently employs about 400 people...
title. It was also their first Pocket PC
Pocket PC
A Pocket PC is also known by Microsoft as a 'Windows Mobile Classic device'. It is a hardware specification for a handheld-sized computer, personal digital assistant , that runs the Microsoft 'Windows Mobile Classic' operating system...
title though it was initially called Diamond Mine on the platform. Bejeweled was a huge success topping all PDA game charts for a long time. It has only been surpassed by Bejeweled 2 and Astraware Sudoku
Sudoku
is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9...
.
In December 2001 Astraware launched their own online store and in 2002 moved into their own premises, hiring full-time support staff. Their offices reside in the Keele University
Keele University
Keele University is a campus university near Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as an experimental college dedicated to a broad curriculum and interdisciplinary study, Keele is most notable for pioneering the dual honours degree in Britain...
Science Park in the Midlands
English Midlands
The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...
, UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
Two of their major successes in the programming field are their technology systems, including their Core Technology Library and their Common Games Library which allowed easier cross-platform production. Their Aurora Audio Library allows playing of tracker tunes on each of their supported platforms.
Most of the music in Astraware games is created by Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
-based Groovy Audio. They are mostly created using ModPlug Tracker
ModPlug Tracker
OpenMPT is an open source audio module tracker for Windows. It was named by Computer Music as one of the top five free music trackers. It originally started out under the name ModPlug Tracker, and was developed by Olivier Lapicque in September 1997....
and Impulse Tracker
Impulse Tracker
Impulse Tracker is a multi-track digital sound tracker . It was one of the last tracker programs for the DOS platform. It was authored by Jeffrey "Pulse" Lim, and example music was provided by Jeffrey Lim and Chris Jarvis...
.
Astraware often license games from PopCap Games
PopCap Games
PopCap Games is an American video game developer and publisher, based in Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded in 2000 by John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka, and currently employs about 400 people...
and GameHouse
GameHouse
GameHouse is a casual game developer, publisher, digital video game distributor, and portal, based in Seattle, Washington, United States-History:...
, among others.
On 7 January 2008, Handmark
Handmark
Handmark is a developer and distributor of mobile content. The company was created in 2000 by the merger of Mobile Generation Software with Palmspring Software....
and Astraware announced a new business relationship, in which Astraware will become part of the Handmark family.
Through the new relationship, Astraware expanded its existing UK games development studio to develop new high profile licenses as well as continuing work on original titles. In addition to Palm OS and Windows Mobile, Astraware released their first titles for Symbian S60
S60 (software platform)
The S60 Platform is a software platform for mobile phones that runs on Symbian OS. It was created by Nokia, who made the platform open source and contributed it to the Symbian Foundation. S60 has been used by mobile device manufacturers including Siemens mobile, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic...
and UIQ
UIQ
UIQ by UIQ Technology is a software platform based upon Symbian OS. Essentially this is a graphical user interface layer that provides additional components to the core OS, to enable the development of feature-rich mobile phones that are open to expanded capabilities through third-party...
in the first quarter of 2008, iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
in August, and BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
devices later in the year.
On 1 January 2010, Astraware was bought out from Handmark by Howard Tomlinson and David Oakley, and has now returned to being an independent games studio.