Firaxis Games

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Firaxis Games

Type	Private (subsidiary of Take2)
Founded	Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States (1996)
Headquarters	Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States
Key people	Sid Meier, Co-founder, Director of Creative Development Jeff Briggs, Co-founder and former CEO
Industry	Video games
Products	Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Sid Meier's Gettysburg! Sid Meier's Civilization III Sid Meier's SimGolf Sid Meier's Pirates! (See complete products listing.)
Employees	several dozen
Slogan	Games that stand the Test of Time
Website	Firaxis.com

Firaxis Games is a computer game developer. It was founded in 1996 by Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs, and Brian Reynolds upon leaving Microprose. The company focuses on strategy games and is based in Hunt Valley, Maryland in the United States. Firaxis has produced several games, including Gettysburg and Antietam, based on their namesake famous American Civil War battles, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a space colonization game taking place in the Alpha Centauri star system. In early 2000, co-founder Brian Reynolds parted with Firaxis to form his new studio, Big Huge Games. Firaxis Games then went on to release Sid Meier's SimGolf, a golf course building/management game vaguely attached to the Sim franchise. Perhaps their most popular release has been Civilization III, and later Civilization IV, a sequel to Meier's Civilization series. In November 2004, Firaxis released Sid Meier's Pirates!, an update of Meier's classic 1987 computer game of the same name. An Xbox version of the game was released in July, 2005, and a PSP version (developed by Full Fat) was released in January 2007. Civilization IV started production in late 2003 and was released on October 24 2005 in the United States, and was released on November 4 2005 in Europe. On November 7 2005, Take-Two Interactive announced that it was acquiring Firaxis. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but according to the SEC filing it amounted for USD$26.7 million in cash, stock, and development advances, with almost $11.3 million of that figure coming in the form of possible considerations based on future product sales.^[1] The company was consolidated with PopTop Software in March of 2006, the resultant combined studio to be headed up by Sid Meier. Jeff Briggs assumed the role of Chairman in April 2006 and left the company completely in November. In April 2007 it was announced that Soren Johnson left the company and joined Electronic Arts to work on Spore with Lead Designer Will Wright. Johnson was formerly a key person for Firaxis, acting as Co-Designer for Civilization III, and later Lead Designer on Civilization IV.^[2]

Games

Most of Firaxis' titles are prefixed with Meier's name, due to the enormous influence of his name in the gaming industry. Nonetheless, many players refer to the titles by their shortened names, omitting this prefix.