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Crimson Skies
''Crimson Skies'' is a tabletop and a video game media franchise created by Jordan Weisman and Dave McCoy, first released as a board game in 1998 and then as a PC game in 2000. The series' intellectual property is currently owned by Microsoft Corporation through its Xbox Game Studios division. Weisman's former company, Smith & Tinker Inc., had announced in 2007 that it had licensed the electronic entertainment rights to the franchise, but no new titles were developed. The ''Crimson Skies'' trademark was renewed in 2013 by Microsoft for video games, although the trademark for other related media has been abandoned. The series is set within an alternate history of the 1930s invented by Weisman and McCoy. Within this divergent timeline, the United States has collapsed, and air travel has become the most popular mode of transportation in North America; as a result, air pirates thrive in the world of ''Crimson Skies''. In describing the concept of ''Crimson Skies'', Jordan Weisman s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jordan Weisman
Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded five game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry. Biography Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, in Chicago, Illinois. He went to the Merchant Marine Academy and briefly attended University of Illinois at Chicago, before leaving school to pursue his business interests. In 1980, Weisman founded role playing game publisher FASA Corporation (short for the Freedonia Aeronautics & Space Administration, named after the fictional country in the Marx Brothers film '' Duck Soup'') with partner L. Ross Babcock. Weisman and Babcock printed up a few hundred copies of Weisman's early adventures for the pen and paper role-playing game, '' Traveller'', and sold them to a local Chicago store before sending them to nationwide distributors. Although working out of Weisman's basement, he and Babcock were looking for outside talent and brought Willia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FASA
Fasa ( fa, فسا, Fasā, also Romanized as Fassa) is a city and capital of Fasa County, Fars Province, Iran. At the 2016 census, its population was 110,825, in 33,379 families. Fasa is the fourth most populous city of the province. The city dates back to the Achaemenid period. Fasa's economy is based on agriculture and Pastoralism. Jahrom, Darab, Sarvestan, Kherameh and Estahban are neighbours of Fasa. This city is located on the road from Shiraz to Kerman, This has made Fasa a strategic and important city. Name The name Fasa is derived from the older form Pasā. Various etymologies for this name have been proposed. Local tradition holds that Fasa is named after a legendary prince named Pasa, son of Fars and grandson of Tahmuras. In Ibn al-Balkhi's retelling the legend, Fars granted the town of Fasa to Pasa; in Hamdallah Mustawfi's version, Pasa founds the city himself (in this version, he is directly the son of Tahmuras). Harold Bailey proposed on linguistic grounds that t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zipper Interactive
Zipper Interactive was an American video game developer based in Redmond, Washington and part of SCE Worldwide Studios. It was founded in June 1995 by Jim Bosler and Brian Soderberg. It created many different games, including the ''SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs'' series of games. ''SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs'' was created in collaboration with the Naval Special Warfare Command and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 2. On January 25, 2006, Sony announced that it had acquired Zipper Interactive to add it to its group of development studios. Games Closure On March 29, 2012, Sony announced that it would be closing Zipper Interactive due to "resource re-alignment." The closure of Zipper Interactive was later confirmed by Sony Computer Entertainment the next day on March 30, 2012. Prior to its closure, Zipper Interactive were working on two unannounced titles for the PlayStation 4 before both projects were cancelled once the closing was complete. One was another entry in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual World Entertainment
BattleTech Centers are commercial virtual entertainment venues that feature multiplayer virtual combat in the fictional ''BattleTech'' universe. The games are played in fully enclosed cockpits with multiple screens, joysticks, and rudder pedals. The centers were initially created and operated by Tim Disney's Virtual World Entertainment, Inc. Today, the gaming cockpits can now be found in various sites around the United States. History The first BattleTech Center opened in Chicago in 1990, with others in Yokohama following in August 1992 and Tokyo in 1993. Eventually, 26 such facilities were built and included other game types and more elaborate operations. These new locations were called 'Virtual World'. Each Virtual World site featured at least 16 networked "pods" designed in part by Frog Design. In 1991, ''Computer and Video Games'' called Battletech "definitely the most exciting interactive videogame system yet devised." It was also featured in Discovery Channel's ''Beyond 2000 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shadowrun
''Shadowrun'' is a science fantasy tabletop role-playing game set in an alternate future in which cybernetics, magic and fantasy creatures co-exist. It combines genres of cyberpunk, urban fantasy and crime, with occasional elements of conspiracy, horror and detective fiction. From its inception in 1989, ''Shadowrun'' has remained among the most popular role-playing games. It has spawned a vast franchise that includes a series of novels, a collectible card game, two miniature-based tabletop wargames, and multiple video games. The title is taken from the game's main premise – a near-future world damaged by a massive magical event, where industrial espionage and corporate warfare runs rampant. A ''shadowrun'' – a successful data theft or physical break-in at a rival corporation or organization – is one of the main tools employed by both corporate rivals and underworld figures. Deckers (futuristic hackers) who can tap into an immersive, three-dimensional cyberspace are o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piracy In The Caribbean
]The era of piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1500s and phased out in the 1830s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe and North America with colonies in the Caribbean began combating pirates. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1660s to 1730s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of the existence of pirate seaports such as Port Royal in Jamaica,Campo-Flores/ Arian, "Yar, Mate! Swashbuckler Tours!," Newsweek 180, no. 6 (2002): 58. Tortuga in Haiti, and Nassau in the Bahamas.Smith, Simon. "Piracy in early British America." History Today 46, no. 5 (May 1996): 29. Piracy in the Caribbean was part of a larger historical phenomenon of piracy, as it existed close to major trade and exploration routes in almost all the five oceans. Causes Pirates were often former sailors experienced in naval warfare. In the 16th century, pirate captains recruited seamen to loot European merchant ships, especially the Spanish treasure fleets sai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alternate History
Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than in real life. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternative history stories propose ''What if?'' scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Alternate history also is a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; as literature, alternate history uses the tropes of the genre to answer the ''What if?'' speculations of the story. Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history stories feature the tropes of time travel between histories, and the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe, by the inhabitants of a given universe; and time travel that divides history into various timestreams. In the Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dieselpunk
Dieselpunk is a retrofuturistic subgenre of science fiction similar to steampunk or cyberpunk that combines the aesthetics of the diesel-based technology of the interwar period through to the 1950s with retro-futuristic technology and postmodern sensibilities. Coined in 2001 by game designer Lewis Pollak to describe his tabletop role-playing game '' Children of the Sun'', the term has since been applied to a variety of visual art, music, motion pictures, fiction, and engineering. Origin The name "dieselpunk" is a derivative of the science fiction subgenre cyberpunk, and represents the time period from World War I until the 1950s, when diesel-based locomotion was the main technological focus of Western culture. The "-punk" suffix attached to the name is representative of the counterculture nature of the genre with regard to its opposition to contemporary aesthetics. The term also refers to the tongue-in-cheek name given to a similar cyberpunk derivative, "steampunk", which fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xbox (console)
The Xbox is a home video game console and the first installment in the Xbox series of video game consoles manufactured by Microsoft. It was released as Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market on November 15, 2001, in North America, followed by Australia, Europe and Japan in 2002. It is classified as a sixth-generation console, competing with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. It was also the first major console produced by an American company since the release of the Atari Jaguar in 1993. The console was announced in March 2000. With the release of the PlayStation 2, which featured the ability to playback CD-ROMs and DVDs in addition to playing games, Microsoft became concerned that game consoles would threaten the personal computer as an entertainment device for living rooms. Whereas most games consoles to that point were built from custom hardware components, the Xbox was built around standard personal computer components, using variations of Micro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personal Computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large, costly minicomputers and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. Primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s, the term home computer was also used. Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with the machines. While personal computer users may develop their own applications, usually these systems run commercial software, free-of-charge software ("freeware"), which is most often proprietary, or free and open-source software, which is provided in "ready-to-run", or binary, form. Software for personal computers is typically developed and distributed independently from the hardware or operating system ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft Game Studios
Xbox Game Studios (previously known as Microsoft Studios, Microsoft Game Studios, and Microsoft Games) is an American video game publisher and part of the Microsoft Gaming division based in Redmond, Washington. It was established in March 2000, spun out from an internal Games Group, for the development and publishing of video games for Microsoft Windows. It has since expanded to include games and other interactive entertainment for the namesake Xbox platforms, Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms, and web-based portals. History As Microsoft Games and Microsoft Game Studios (2000–2011) In the early 1990s, Microsoft published a few video games. It published subLOGIC's ''Microsoft Flight Simulator'' and several Microsoft Entertainment Pack compilations of minigames, but was best known for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. In 1992, the company began increasing its focus on games. It announced ''Microsoft Golf'' for Windows, based on Access Software's '' Links'', and expand ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
