Havok, the middleware firm known best for its physics engines, has announced the acquisition of Kore Virtual Machine. Kore VM, developed by New Game Technologies, is a small virtual machine based on the Lua scripting language. It was a part of Kore Studio, a development environment for Microsoft Visual Studio. Kore VM itself has already been licensed by Sega, Bungie, Lionhead, Masthead Studios, United Front Games, and NetDevil, in addition to powering Gas Powered Games’ Supreme Commander 2.
Havok has taken over all functions of Kore, and the product will be renamed as Havok Script. Havok Script can be licensed as a standalone product from Havok’s other offerings, with more announcements on interaction with those offerings planned in the future. The new Havok Script will provide customers with the fastest virtual machine for consoles and an extensive toolset.
"This is a very exciting time for Havok as we complete our first product technology acquisition and extend our offering to include Havok Script,” said David Coghlan, Managing Director of Havok. “Havok has a long standing reputation for supporting our customers extremely well and as you would expect with any Havok acquisition, we will work closely with Havok Script customers to service and support them through the transition of the product to Havok."
"We'd been looking at taking the company in a new R&D direction for some time. I guess we thrive on new product development, so we were delighted when the opportunity came up to place the Kore VM technology with Havok,” said Hugh Reynolds, CEO of New Game Technologies. “Without a doubt, Havok is the company that has the best track-record in the games industry for supporting customers and delivering optimized cross-platform technology. It's a real win-win result."
