Westwood Studios

Westwood was founded in Las Vegas in 1985 by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle, originally as Westwood Associates, a work-for-hire shop that ported and built games for larger publishers. The pair chose the desert over Silicon Valley partly to keep talent focused, and the studio quickly earned a reputation for polished, ambitious design.

Its first landmark was Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (1992), which crystallized the vocabulary of the real-time strategy genre as we know it: harvesting resources, building a base, and commanding units with a mouse in real time. That template exploded with Command & Conquer (1995), a slick, live-action-laden war between the globalist GDI and the messianic terror faction Nod. The follow-up, Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996), leaned into camp Cold War alt-history and sold millions, cementing Westwood as the reigning king of RTS alongside Blizzard.

Westwood's range went well beyond strategy. The Lands of Lore series and the Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawler Eye of the Beholder showcased its RPG craft, and Blade Runner (1997) was a technically astonishing adventure game with real-time voxel characters and a branching plot that let the replicant hunt play out differently each time.

Virgin Interactive owned the studio through its golden years, and in 1998 Electronic Arts acquired it. The marriage soured. Later Command & Conquer entries and the online-focused Command & Conquer: Renegade and Emperor: Battle for Dune never recaptured the old magic under EA's schedules. In 2003, EA folded Westwood into its Los Angeles operation and shut the Las Vegas studio down, laying off most staff. Some founders and veterans regrouped as Petroglyph Games, carrying the RTS torch forward. Westwood's name still evokes an era when strategy games felt genuinely new.