Activision Acquires ShaderWorks Technology

Activision, an international publisher of interactive games, with headquarters in Santa Monica, CA, has recently acquired full rights to the hardware shader development toolkit ShaderWorks as of March 20, 2005, according to a note on ShaderWorks' official website. Scott Bean, president and engineer of Mad Software Inc., has joined Activision's team of game developers as Technical Director for tools, and will continue to develop a next generation in-house version of ShaderWorks for use in development of future Activision titles. The announcement also noted that ShaderWorks XT Alpha 1.0 download will no longer be available. Bean commented in his note regarding the acquisition: "I was continuously unable to obtain any corporate backing from some of the major software / hardware companies in the industry... I am however very pleased that Activision took over the project. They were extremely upfront about their interest in ShaderWorks, and negotiations were surprisingly painless."