Troika Games
Troika Games was an American video game developer co-founded by Jason Anderson, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. The company was focused on role-playing video games between 1998 and 2005, best known for "" and "". History. In 1997, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson were working on the "Fallout" sequel at Interplay. Finishing the initial design for "Fallout 2", they were unable to come to an agreement with Interplay about the future team structure. They decided to leave Interplay to form a company that felt more like the old Interplay, producing role-playing video games for PC  in 1997. They formed their company on April 1, 1998, calling their new company Troika Games (a Russian word "Тройка" meaning "three of any kind"), since they were the three key developers behind the critically acclaimed "Fallout". They initially planned to do games exclusively for one publisher (Sierra Entertainment), but every game was published by a different company. After being unable to secure funding for future projects, they were forced to lay off their staff in late 2004 and later closed their doors on February 24, 2005. Games. In 1998, Troika started the initial design on a steampunk fantasy crossover  role-playing video game named "" and convinced Sierra Entertainment to publish it. The game was launched on August 21, 2001. While criticized for being unpolished and having a bad combat engine, it received in general favorable reviews with an average of 81% on Metacritic. With 234,000 units sold it is Troika's best selling game. In 2016 it was released on Steam, where as of March 2017 it has over 95,000 owners. After "Arcanum" was released in 2001, two teams started to work on two separate games. One team created "The Temple of Elemental Evil" for publisher Atari which was  released on September 26, 2003. It was lauded for the good implementation of the D&D 3.5 system but overall it got mixed reviews due to gameplay bugs and lack of a plot. With a 71% on Metacritic it was the lowest rated Troika game. It sold about 128,000 units. The other team worked for Activision on "". Using an early version of the Source engine, development was finished in October 2004. Due to contractual obligations with Valve, Activision was not allowed to release the game before Valve released "Half-Life 2", scheduled for release in November 2004. Troika Games used the  interim period to code a patch into the main program. "Bloodlines" was released on November 16, 2004 (the same day as "Half-Life 2"). Critics praised "Bloodlines" visual, audio and story but warned about a bug-ridden game. It got a rating of 80% on Metacritic, and sold merely 72,000 units on original release. With the addition of the game to the digital distributors Direct2Drive and Steam in 2016, a significant number of units were sold digitally. For instance, approximately 550,000 people own the game on Steam as of March 2017. In 2004, Troika tried to find a publisher for  an unnamed post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, but were unsuccessful, leading to rumors in January 2005 that the company had already shut down. Screenshots of the unnamed game were posted in 2004 to the "Fallout" fan sites "No Mutants Allowed" and "Duck and Cover". A video of the tech demo was released in early 2005, weeks before closing. Tim Cain later confirmed that this was supposed to be a sequel to "Fallout": "Leonard pursued "Fallout 3", which ultimately went to Bethesda, who outbid us."