Where in the world?

Games

Of course, all this outrageously expensive high-performance hardware would not be worth nothing, were it not for the games we play on our tricked-out rigs. Unlike hardware companies, games developers are spread out far more evenly across the world.

One of the best-selling games of last year was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which, despite its heavy steepings in black and urban American culture, was developed by a bunch of Brits! The team at Rockstar North - formerly DMA Design - responsible for the GTA series, is based in Edinburgh, yet has somehow managed to find a world acclaim so elusive for other Scots dev teams.

Tomb Raider fans might be surprised to learn that, despite her posh-bird accent, Lara Croft actually hails from Wimbledon. Owners of the franchise, Eidos, have their main offices on the outskirts of the capital. At least Lara can get plenty of gun-toting action practice - we're pretty sure that the Wimbledon football team amounts to little more than a bunch of dinosaurs now.

Having been bought out by Microsoft to bring their then-revolutionary FPS title Halo to the Xbox, it's no surprise to find that Bungie have been based just around the corner from Microsoft's Redmond campus in Seattle, for the past 4 years. However, it was later admitted that displacing the team from their native Chicago was the wrong move and later aquisitions by Microsoft have resulted in developers not relocating.

Maybe living in each other's pockets has proven too much for the lovebirds, because Bungie announced in March that they were moving to a new location in Washington. Apparently, the team needs bigger offices to accommodate the extra staff required to make Halo 3 – Microsoft claim that the studio will double in staff to work on the second sequel.


Also famously based in Seattle are Valve, creators of Half-Life. They occupy two floors of an office block in Bellevue, Washington, not far from Bill Gates' US$97 million mansion on the shores of Lake Washington. The office itself is everything you imagine one of the coolest games company's office might be like: fan art and replica sculptures of iconic in-game characters and weapons litter the foyer and Piloux's famous Blackmesa II case mod takes pride of place in the Conference Room.

If you've been following the ever-delayed progress of top title S.T.A.L.K.E.R, you might know that it's being developed in the same Eastern European location the game itself is set in. Developers GSC Game World run their office out of Kiev, in the Ukraine. The boys caused quite a stir when it was revealed they travelled to nearby Chernobyl to conduct research and take photographs of the famous nuclear disaster site. Whilst the game was due to be released last year, it now looks like we won't see it until the summer, if at all.

[/center]Russia is swiftly becoming a major technological force, with plenty of graduates now coming out of college with a qualification in something technical. NVIDIA has recently set up a games testing lab in Moscow, where games developers can send their code to be tested on a myriad of NVIDIA hardware and software platforms. Through testing, coders can work out the optimal in-game settings for each graphics card in their game, and can also get a thorough bug-test.