SingleTrac: History and Key Facts

SingleTrac Entertainment Technologies, Inc. was an American video game developer. It was founded in March 1994 by Michael Ryder, Todd Kelly, and Michael Bartholomew, who were former employees of Evans & Sutherland, bringing their 3D graphics and software engineering skills into the video game industry. The company, in the late summer of 1994 then signed a deal with Sony Imagesoft for development of two games for the newly-launched PlayStation, and Sony Electronic Publishing provided funding for the company. Its most famous titles were the Twisted Metal and Jet Moto video game series. At its heyday, it was closely associated with Sony Computer Entertainment, with whom they produced the above two series.

The company's first two games, WarHawk and Twisted Metal, were major critical and commercial successes, leading publisher Sony Computer Entertainment to contract two further games from SingleTrac. SingleTrac had ambitions of becoming a video game publisher as well as developer. In early 1997, the company signed a deal with Microsoft to enable them to publish PC games, but these plans never came to fruition. Later in 1997, SingleTrac signed on as a developer for the Nintendo 64, but they ultimately never produced any Nintendo 64 games. After producing the two contracted games for Sony Computer Entertainment, due to disputes, as Sony still owns the rights to its SingleTrac creations up to this point, SingleTrac was bought by the video game publisher GT Interactive. It was closed down in 2000 before GT Interactive itself was bought out by Infogrames.

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