Radiant Entertainment, Inc. is an American

video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a large ...

based in Los Altos, California. Founded by twin brothers Tom and Tony Cannon in 2011, the company has developed ''

Stonehearth ''Stonehearth'' is a 2018 city-building game developed by Radiant Entertainment. After an early access phase beginning in 2015, the game was released for Microsoft Windows and macOS on July 25, 2018. A tentative port for Linux was canceled, alon ...

'', a city-building game, which was released in July 2018 after three years in early access. Radiant was acquired by

Riot Games Riot Games, Inc. is an American video game developer, publisher and esports tournament organizer based in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in September 2006 by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill to develop ''League of Legends'' and went on t ...

in March 2016 and Radiant's second game, '' Rising Thunder'', was canceled during its alpha phase. The game was later replaced by a freeware "community edition" in January 2018.

History

Radiant Entertainment was founded by twin brothers Tom and Tony Cannon. They had previously launched the Evolution Championship Series (Evo), an

esports Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, individually or as teams. Although orga ...

tournament for

fighting game A fighting game, also known as a versus fighting game, is a video game genre, genre of video game that involves combat between two or more players. Fighting game combat often features mechanics such as Blocking (martial arts), blocking, grappli ...

s, and developed GGPO, a fighting game middleware platform. They were most recently employed as software engineers for VMware but quit their jobs in 2011 to develop video games full-time, founding Radiant in Los Altos, California. The studio launched a

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

campaign via

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

for ''

'', a city-building game, in 2013, initially seeking . The funding concluded one month later with a total of pledged by backers. ''Stonehearth'' was made available in early access in June 2015 and released in July 2018, although many development goals from the Kickstarter campaign several left unfulfilled. In a June 2015 round of seed funding, Radiant raised from investors Andreessen Horowitz, London Venture Partners, and General Catalyst. Radiant's second game, '' Rising Thunder'', was announced in July 2015. It was a fighting game created by Seth Killian, who had joined the studio after departing Santa Monica Studio. A "technical alpha" was opened to a handful of players at the end of the month and to the general public in August. On March 8, 2016, Radiant announced that it had been acquired by

, the developer of '' League of Legends'', for an undisclosed sum. Alongside the acquisition, ''Rising Thunder'' was canceled and consequently shut down later that month. The development team behind ''Rising Thunder'' was re-allocated to a new, unannounced project. A freeware version of ''Rising Thunder'', dubbed the "community edition", was released in January 2018 with

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

servers. In August 2019, Tom Cannon announced that Radiant was developing another fighting game, revealed in October to be set in the ''League of Legends'' universe and codenamed "''Project L''".

Games developed

References

{{Riot Games 2011 establishments in California 2016 mergers and acquisitions Tencent Video game companies established in 2011 Video game companies of the United States Video game development companies