Firefly Studios

Firefly Studios is a computer game developer that has offices in London, England and Canton, Connecticut, with a QA department in Aberdeen, Scotland. The Company was formed in August 1999 by Simon Bradbury, Eric Ouellette and David Lester who had worked together on numerous titles such as the highly successful 'Caesar' and 'Lords of the Realm' series. Upon forming, Firefly released a mission statement that set out their vision for their company :

"FireFly Studios goal is to create compelling new worlds for people to play in. We aim to provide a richer environment for the player by continually increasing the level of visual and coded detail in our game worlds. Our expertise is in creating strategy based sim games and we will continue to evolve the genre by combining detailed visuals, in depth game play, compelling characters and an easy learning curve. If we have done our job well, players will be able to see the world they have built come to life and take on a personality of its own".

The company has focused on Historic real-time strategy titles for the PC and Macintosh systems, and is best known for its 'Stronghold' series of games.

History
Firefly's first title, Stronghold was wildly successful both critically and commercially, and the sequel Stronghold Crusader managed to maintain the high standards of the original.

The company has however struggled to recreate the popularity of its original 'Stronghold' and 'Stronghold Crusader' titles; Stronghold 2 and Stronghold Legends both reviewed poorly with metascores of 63% and 57% respectively, and the last of the series, Stronghold Extreme, has received the worst reviews to date, receiving average 40% scores.

A brief collaboration with Firaxis Games produced CivCity: Rome, which again reviewed poorly, and was in fact the last Firefly title published by Take 2 Interactive.

Future
The highly publicised title, Dungeon Hero, being developed for the PC and Xbox 360 systems, has been in development for several years. Originally being published by Gamecock Media Group until they were bought out by SouthPeak Interactive in October 2008, it is currently without a publisher despite Southpeak publishing every other Gamecock title due for release. Firefly Studios have announced that the title is 'on hold', and with the last of several planned release dates having passed, it has further fuelled speculation that this title is now a vaporware title.

The latest title, Stronghold Kingdoms, is Firefly's first foray into the MMORPG genre, hoping to publish in 2010, and is being developed by a compact team of 8.

Firefly has also previously stated in 2008 that they would be working on Stronghold 3 then Crusader 2 due to the high demand by fans but only after the completion of Dungeon Hero. In 2009 when asked if they had any other unannounced game in development other than Dungeon Hero and Stronghold Kingdoms, the answer was that they still had one more game in development. In Firefly's second newsletter, they stated that they had "something very big in the pipeline" which will be revealed in 2010.

Stronghold 3 was officially announced on May 14, 2010 by Southpeak Interactive for a Spring 2011 release.

Games

 * Stronghold (2001)
 * Stronghold: Crusader (2002)
 *  Space Colony (2003)
 * Stronghold 2 (2005)
 * CivCity: Rome (2006)
 * Stronghold Legends (2006)
 * Stronghold Crusader Extreme (2008)
 * Stronghold Kingdoms (2010)
 * Stronghold 3 (2011)
 * Dungeon Hero (TBA)