Black Widow Games was a video game developer specializing in promotional mods for Quake and Half-Life3D engines. They are best known for their They Hunger series. Prominent members included Neil Manke, Einar Saukas, and Magnus Jansén. The company business model is based on developing contract-work mods for the marketing campaigns of customer companies and products, freely distributed for promotion.
History
Founded in 1997 to produce contractual mods for state of the art 3D game engines, Black Widow Games would release 14 games between their first mod, Soldier Of Fortune, and 2003. Notable releases included the Half Life spin-off, USS Darkstar, and the They Hunger series. They Hunger in particular generated extensive player discussion and was considered an example of good game play within the realm of Half-Life mods. In October 2005, the company declared it was not possible anymore to produce full-fledged single player mods working on low budget promotional projects within reduced development cycles, because of the higher level of detail required for modern 3D engines. At this time, the company revealed it had been secretly developing for almost a year its first commercial game , based on the Half-Life 2Source engine. Based on the popular survival horror series, They Hunger which Black Widow Software had created in 2000 and released as a bonus with copies of PC Gamer magazine, They Hunger: Lost Souls is being developed using the Sourceengine and will feature a plotline revolving around a zombie outbreak in North-Eastern Europe in the 1960s. Apart from a detailed plotline and a few developers' screenshots however, little information has been released about the game since 2005. Sparse updates have been published over the years at the company's official website and in a few specialized game magazines, and the final product is expected to be released via Steam. Drawing some comparisons to vaporware titles, Planet Half-Life announced on April 1, 2007 that They Hunger: Lost Souls had again been redesigned and was set for release as a Nintendo DS game. A They Hunger game using the Source engine was under development for a time, but has since been canceled. The full title of the installment was They Hunger: Lost Souls, replacing the rumored temporary name They Hunger: Source. The installment had been under development since 2005, although over the years, little information was released, apart from sparse updates at the company's official website and a few specialized game magazines. However, recently, one of the developers confessed that Neil Manke has been very ill and as such the game has since been canceled. In November 2008, the developers of the Sven Co-op mod announced that they had been working with Black Widow Games to develop a co-op version of They Hunger, which was later released as an addon to be played in the mod in December 2008.
