Havok empowers game developers with new tools for Wii U

31 Jan 2013

David Coghlan, managing director, Havok

The Dublin-based Emmy Award-winning tech company Havok has revealed that its full suite of development tools is now available for the Nintendo Wii U platform.

This new offering follows an initial agreement between Havok and Nintendo last March, making free binary downloads of Havok’s Physics and Animation technologies available to Nintendo Wii U developers.

“We have shared a long-term partnership with Nintendo and are pleased to offer licensing of our entire product suite for Wii U developers worldwide,” Havok managing director David Coghlan said.

“With several great Havok-powered launch titles recently released, we are pleased to see Wii U developers pushing the hardware with Havok’s tech. We look forward to seeing Havok Vision Engine power some great high-fidelity games on the new platform.”

Recent Havok-powered Wii U titles include Darksiders II, Skylanders Giants, Assassin’s Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Disney’s Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two.

The news comes just weeks after it emerged that for the fifth time Havok won the award for Best Middleware from Game Developer magazine’s Front Line Awards.

Havok was founded at Trinity College Dublin in 1998 and its physics technology appears in top-selling game titles, as well as a variety of Hollywood movies. Intel acquired Havok in 2007 for US$110m.

The original founding team behind Havok – Hugh Reynolds and Steve Collins – recently started a new company called Swrve, which is creating 100 new jobs after raising US$6.25m in a funding round led by Atlantic Bridge Partners and Intel Capital.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com