Sequoia Studios was founded in April 1999 and our initial location
was in the Business Park at Richmond Road in Ridgecrest, California in June,
1999.
The company's first digital animation project was "Desert Phoenix" - an 8 minute film for use in a Doron motion ride. That team included four graduate interns of the Academy of Digital Animation at Cerro Coso College in Ridgecrest.
In October, 2001, Sequoia Studios purchased the South Fork Nursery and Ryckman ranch located on the South Fork of the Wild and Scenic Kern River
Over a two year period we converted the nursery buildings into the studios where we work and live today.
Course Games™ was launched by Sequoia Studios in March, 2004 to focus our abundant energies on the production of Serious Games. It seems like yesterday, but that was ten years ago.
From 1999-2009 we developed with Virtools as our middleware and we executed a wide range of games during that decade - from short cycle, single level learning games to a full blown MMO from scratch for corporate training and then the Survival Master STEM Epic with 11 single player levels and two multiplayer levels. As Virtools developers, we enjoyed spectacular support from the Virtools/3DVia team: Virgile Delporte, Martin St-Germain, Edouard Lorin, Gerald Nacache, Eric Vandermeeren, Lynne Wilson, Xavier Fouger, Cliff Medling, Christine Moses, and Hervé Foucher ... just to name a few.
Since 2010, we’ve been powered by Unity. Amazing, awesome, unlimited … supercool. The company provides amazing support, the mega community of developers is a treasure trove, and the development road map and 3D party tools is just superb.
All who have worked with me over the last 15 years know that I will probably be the last Softimage animator left on planet earth. From my first work with Softimage 3|D in 1996, I was hooked. In 1999, instead of jumping on the Maya bandwagon, I choose to continue on with Softimage's complete rewrite - XSI. I still use Autodesk Softimage every day on our current products. Alas, Autodesk will no longer be continuing Softimage, so soon I will literally have no choice but to migrate to Maya or 3ds Max.
I was also an early poster child for Macromedia Breeze, and we still rely upon Adobe Connect for our virtual team live meetings.
To the many clients, collaborators, and friends of Sequoia Studios and Course Games - Thank You! The first fifteen years has flown by, and we look forward to many new adventures in the years to come.
