Failure stories rarely end well, but Green Throttle Games, which released a gamepad for Android games a year ago, was lucky. Today it became known that Google acquired it (or rather what was left of it).
In 2012, when people still believed in the microconsole market, a small studio Green Throttle Games attracted the attention of the press. Its founder and executive director Charles Huang, better known as one of the authors of the musical hit Guitar Hero, announced the development of a game controller for Android games.
He positioned his Atlas Controller brainchild not as an independent console, but as a peripheral device with which it is possible to play games originally created for mobile devices on a TV.
The problem was that the gamepad supported only those games that could be found in the Arena application, in fact a gaming hub distributed on Google Play and Amazon Appstore. They, in turn, were few. It was not even about tens, but about units.
Thus, Green Throttle Games, in fact, blocked its own oxygen. The convulsions of the company, in which venture capitalists invested about $ 6 million, lasted a little less than a year. In November 2013, she removed the Arena application from the stores, thereby instantly turning the Atlas Controller still sold on Amazon into a useless piece of plastic.
It would seem that the end of the story. However, today it became known that Google acquired the company’s achievements, and also hired two of its three founders – Matt Crowley and Karl Townsend, who also previously worked on the first version of the Palm Pilot.
What Google will do with the legacy of a far from the most successful controller is a big question. There is an opinion that the search giant is going to release its “TV box”. And, accordingly, in this she may need the experience of two industry veterans.
As for Charles Huang, he is still listed as the executive director of Green Throttle Games. And he also has a new stratap – Singtrix, a karaoki machine of the “next generation”.