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Monolith Productions
Defunct american video game developer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Monolith Productions, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Kirkland, Washington. The company was a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Games from August 2004 until its shutdown in 2025.[3] It formerly published third-party games in the 1990s. In February 2025, it was reported that Warner Bros. Games had decided to close the studio.[4]
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Monolith Productions was founded on October 25, 1994 by Bryan Bouwman, Toby Gladwell, Brian Goble, Jace Hall, Garrett Price, Paul Renault, and Brian Waite.[5] Co-founder Brian Goble had this to say regarding the company name.
At the time we formed the company, DOS was still the OS of choice for games. Because of this, we knew we had to come up with a name that was 8 characters or less (for 8.3 filenames). We had been researching story and technology ideas for our demo CD and we were watching a lot of movies. "Monolith" came up, was semi mysterious, wasn't taken, and was 8 characters. Perfect.[5]
Several of the founders, include Hall, were employees of software company Edmark at the time, and the group had gotten together frequently to play games like Doom. Several felt they could try their own hand at making video games. To promote their initial ideas, they took advantage of the Redbook audio format for compact discs that allowed both audio and digital files to be stored on the same media. Hall left Edmark to start promotion of the company, and ended up with Microsoft, which was preparing for the release of Windows 95. Microsoft brought on Monolith to develop gaming CDs to demonstrate the capabilities of Windows 95 and DirectX, with the remaining founders quitting Edmark and working out of offices at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington.[6]
Hall used the gaming CDs to continue to build out a list of contacts for future expansion. This led to a significant investment from Japanese print publisher Takarajimasha, allowing Monolith to establish their own set of offices and bring on more staff to do full-time production by 1996.[6] Initial work was done towards Claw, a game based on a shelved project by Garrett. During development, Monolith acquired Q Studios, a development team led by a friend Nick Newhard. At the time, Q Studios was finishing work on Blood and Monolith switched to focus on shipping it instead. Blood was one of the last games to use the 2.5D Build engine, but meanwhile Monolith also had a team building an in-house 3D engine. Blood was a hit with the Monolith team and replaced Doom as their office deathmatch game.[6]
The company is best known for the Blood, No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R series. Monolith developed the LithTech game engine which was used for most of their games starting with Shogo: Mobile Armor Division in September 1998. Between 1997 and 1999, Monolith also published games–some developed by the studio, some by third parties.
In 2004, Monolith Productions was acquired by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (now Warner Bros. Games).[3]
In 2014, the company released the title Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor with a sequel entitled Middle-earth: Shadow of War being released in 2017.
In 2021, the company announced that they were developing a video game starring Wonder Woman.[7]
In 2025, Warner Bros. Games closed the studio alongside Player First Games and WB Games San Diego, cancelling Wonder Woman and refocusing development efforts on core intellectual properties.[4]
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