Factor 5 - History

History

Factor 5 started out developing games under partnership with Rainbow Arts for the Amiga computer, where they had their earliest moderate success with Katakis, a R-Type clone of impressive technical performance that even granted them the official conversion rights of the Irem game to those platforms, acquired by Rainbow Arts. Their first important success, however, came with Turrican, a game designed by Rainbow Arts' designer Manfred Trenz. Factor 5 handled the Amiga and Atari ST versions of the game, and together with the original Commodore 64 version and several others, Turrican was a major hit across Europe in 1990.

After they finished work on Turrican II for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1991, Factor 5 built their own development kits and software environments for the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis codenamed Pegasus SNES and Pegasus Mega Drive. Subsequently, they decided to focus their efforts towards console game development in 1992 with several projects for the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis, including new Turrican games and other titles contracted by companies like LucasArts, Hudson Soft and Konami, the latter of which had also Game Boy development contracts with them. In 1993, Factor 5 produced their last Amiga effort, an Amiga conversion of Mega Turrican handled with programming support from fellow company Neon Studios. They would develop games for the SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Boy until 1996, when they switched their efforts to the PlayStation.

With the development of PlayStation games for LucasArts, the Germans found several communication difficulties in working with their North American partner due to the distance between both countries and the net lines speed of that time being insufficient for the big transfer data the console required. It was this, together with the legal help support offered by LucasArts, which made the company up to the decision of opening a new Factor 5 branch in the US, in which the core of the development team from Germany was established after they finished work with their PlayStation games in late 1996.

For a long time, the North American branch of Factor 5 was an exclusive, prominent development partner with both LucasArts and Nintendo, developing both game titles for the former and middleware tools for the latter. During that time, the studio gained considerable critical and commercial praise for its technical proficiency, producing what are often cited as some of the most visually advanced titles on the Nintendo 64 and the Nintendo GameCube, all based on LucasArts properties. Two high profile middleware tools were also developed by the company for Nintendo, MusyX, a sound system produced in cooperation with Dolby Laboratories, and the DivX For Games SDK, integrating the functionality of the popular video codec into Nintendo's development tools.

In late December 2008, several online media outlets reported that Brash Entertainment (Factor 5's publisher of their current project) would close at the end of the month after encountering financial problems. This sudden interruption in funding left Factor 5 with their own funding difficulties, eventually causing its closure in May 2009.

Factor 5 is currently involved in litigation with its former employees in the defunct North American Factor 5 company. The suit alleges that Factor 5 did not pay its employees for work during November and December, that employees were laid off without the required notice by law, that employees did not receive their vacation pay, and that the company misled the employees. The suit is filed in Marin Superior Court.