A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

For those not in the know, Scaleform was a UI middleware library developed from work called "Anti-Grain Geometry" by the late Maxim Shemanarev, in conjunction with funding and development by Brendan Iribe and Mike Antonov.

If the latter two names are familiar, it's because they left Scaleform in early 2012 to help form Oculus.

Scaleform was essentially a clean-room implementation of Adobe Flash, including both an ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3 VM. It was highly utilized in the game industry.

It was used in such titles as GTA IV onward, the Elder Scrolls starting with (I think) Oblivion. Mass Effect. Arkham Asylum. Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The JackBox Party Pack. It had UnrealEngine 3 integration, as well as (briefly) UE4 integration (you're welcome).

The company was a rising star in the middleware market, providing good performance (if you took the time to tune it) and being approachable by artists, given the fact that you could author your entire UI in Adobe Flash.

The company was purchased by Autodesk shortly before I joined in early 2012. To call Autodesk's ownership of the company "chaotic" would be an understatement; almost overnight, it went from a company that could nurture positive developer relationships to profit-seeking.

Autodesk really had no idea the gem that they were sitting on. Rather than being tasked with maintaining and building positive relationships with developers, the scope of the project was exploded. In pursuit of ever-higher profits, ADSK wanted us to look into the IoT market.

I kid you not, they had us investigating pairing up Scaleform with Samsung smart devices for things like washing machines, dishwashers, and thermostats.

In late 2013, I jumped ship for greener pastures in the form of Mojang, which I've already spoken about. But at that point, Scaleform was already on its last legs. With the mortal departure of Maxim and personnel departure of Brendan and Mike, there was little to keep it going.