Playstation of the West.

• Author: Kimball, Chase
• Position: Beyond Games - Brief Article

Utah is awash with computer gaming companies. Ranked as one of the top five technology hotspots by Wired Magazine, the state is one of the premier computer gaming centers in the United States due to its abundance of tech talent and high quality of life.

One such company is Beyond Games (BG), founded in 1992 by Kris Johnson at the age of 25. Johnson was first introduced to computers when his father purchased a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1977. He taught himself how to program games and read everything he could get his hands on about games and computers.

Years later, after moving from Denver to Salt Lake, Johnson attended the University of Utah. Frustrated with the slowness of academic life, he withdrew from school to start his own computer gaming company.

With only two part-time employees, BG's first game, BattleWheels, created for the Atari Lynx console, won the Innovations Award at the 1993 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Console games are designed for small game machines like Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation, and other devices that connect to a television. Personal computer (PC) games are designed to run on Windows and DOS programs.

Last year BG published their first PC product, an automobile combat game called Redline that sold about 40,000 copies, a good run for a PC game.

With all its work done in-house, except some of its music, BG's development time for the average game ranges from 12 to 36 months with budgets of $1 to $3.5 million.

Currently, BG engineers are working on a new game engine that can be used for...