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VirtekInternational
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1994-09-26
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From R.Hollands@sheffield.ac.uk Mon Sep 26 13:58:35 1994
Date: Sun, 22 May 94 23:44:37 +0100
From: R Hollands <R.Hollands@sheffield.ac.uk>
To: scivw@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: NEWS: New 3D Graphics Toolkit Company
News clipping from VR NEWS (May 1994) - Reproduced with permission
Borland founder backs 3D software toolkit company.
Neils Jensen, co-founder of Borland International, is backing a small British
software company which aims to take a share of the growing market for 3D
graphical toolkits. The company, called Virtek International Ltd, will launch
its '3D-Ware' product at VR '94 in San Jose. This will be a DOS only release,
to be followed by a Windows version later in the year. Licencees of the first
release will be offered a free upgrade. Target markets are games companies and
virtual reality software developers. A US marketing company, Virtek
Corporation, has also been formed, and will start operations during May from
offices in Pompano Beach, Florida.
A considerable flurry of entrepreneurial activity has been visible ever since
the Canon subsidiary, Criterion Software, launched its Renderware toolkit in
January. Criterion spoke at the launch of a billion dollar market for
Renderware, capturing the attention of numerous graphical software specialists
with ambitions to share that market. The emerging competitive offerings all
claim faster performance that Renderware, and are priced competitively. Few of
the originators have any experience of large-scale international marketing and
distribution of systems software however, which is why the involvement of
Jensen in Virtek may be of particular significance.
Borland was founded in 1982 by Jensen and two Danish friends. They brought in
Philip Kahn to head their US operation shortly afterwards, and achieved
spectacular growth based on products such as MenuMaster, SideKick and Turbo
Pascal. The company floated on the London stock exchange in the mid-1980s, and
on NASDAQ in 1990. Jensen detached himself from the company, settled in the
UK, and sold off his holdings some years ago.
Virtek in the UK comprises a team of four development staff run by Philip
Allsop, whose background is in the computer games industry. His successes
include F-29 Retaliator and EPIC, both of which sold over 100,000 copies. In
1993 his PC game 'TFX' was released, and it is the high-performance low-level
graphics routines developed for this game which form the nucleus of the 3D-
Ware toolkit. The company is currently working flat out to get the product
ready for launch, but an early and partial demonstration laid on for VR NEWS
showed promise.
Jensen takes the view that the market for VR and 3D graphics software is
"immature, and nobody's property yet", and believes that, apart from
performance and functionality, 3D-Ware's special attraction to developers will
be its freedom from royalties. The DOS Professional version sells for $1495,
and the Standard version (excludes texturing and Gourard shading) for $249.
No royalties are payable on games or experiences developed using the toolkit,
which has also been designed to be usable from any language compiler,
including C, Basic and Pascal.
Virtek International Ltd
Salford, UK
Tel: 061-237-9929
Fax: 061-237-5553