As the name suggests, the principal focus of The Game Creators is to develop and publish PC game creation software - a mission that has earned the team a worldwide reputation as the foremost experts in this genre.
Based in Wigan, UK, they are now the most recognised providers of game creation software on the Internet with a comprehensive range of affordable, cutting edge game creation tools that make it easier for anyone to make their own computer games.
As you can see, this website has become the hub of a global game creation community with a free monthly newsletter, hundreds of lines of free source code and other downloads, and hugely popular on-line discussion forums that, at a recent count, had clocked up over 760,000 messages!
It was in 1999 that programmer Lee Bamber hit on the idea of creating a more intuitive programming language which he called Dark Basic. He was soon joined by his partner Rick Vanner who he had met while the two worked for one of Europe's foremost publishers of education software.
With Rick taking over sales and marketing, Dark Basic Software Ltd was formed -later to become The Game Creators.
When the original Dark Basic Classic was finished, it was used to produce games creation program The 3D Game Maker. More programmers and artists joined and after one and a half years of work, the more sophisticated Dark Basic Professional was launched along with Dark Matter, a collection of 3D objects for games. The team has more recently completed a three year project which saw the launch of specialist game making product, FPS Creator.
In addition to selling its own products, which have now been translated into many different languages, The Game Creators acts as a re-seller for a whole range of other products designed to satisfy the many and varied needs of game creators.
"We realised that we couldn't do everything ourselves so we looked out for complementary products to increase the range of the tools that we could provide for the game creation community", said Rick.
These include specialised packages for a whole range of game assets from plants, trees and terrains to textures, sound effects and skies.
The programming skills of The Game Creators are also used for third party development - their most notable projects being the Driving Test Success series which has achieved sales of over 1.7 million units on CD-Rom for UK publisher Focus.
