In 1985 Century 23 Computers, one of the first computer shops in Las Vegas, was a favourite haunt of programmers and users, and one of the regulars was a 21-year-old called Brett Sperry. He made friends with a salesman there, a student named Louis Castle who was paying his way through college, partly because Castle owned a printer and Sperry could not afford one. Castle turned out to be a gifted programmer as well. When Sperry landed a job from Epyx on Temple of Apshai that was too big for one person, the two of them took it on together, and Westwood began. Over the next eighteen years Castle programmed, designed, ran the art department and produced games, from the Mega Drive’s The Lion King to Blade Runner, and with Sperry he led the studio that made Dune II and Command & Conquer.
Fast facts
- Born: 1964 or 1965, in Las Vegas, where he grew up.
- Co-founded: Westwood Studios (at first Westwood Associates), with Brett Sperry, in 1985.
- At Westwood: vice-president of creative development, later executive vice-president; programmer, designer, art director and producer.
- Games he named as his favourites: Blade Runner, The Lion King and DragonStrike.
- After Westwood: vice-president at EA Los Angeles; chief executive of InstantAction (2009); vice-president of studios at Zynga; head of Amazon Game Studios’ Seattle studio (2017); Deviation Games (2022).
A printer and a garage
The story of the shop and the printer comes from PC Player’s history of Westwood in 1999. Sperry told the same magazine in 1996 that in 1985 there had been just the two of them; at the company’s official celebration in 1995 he looked round at the staff and friends and counted about 120 people. Castle had been born and raised in Las Vegas, and he stayed: asked in 2001 whether the city distracted him from work, he said that for someone born and raised there, “the ‘lure’ of the mountains and forests is far stronger”.
The company started in a garage. Nintendo Magazine System said so in 1994, and Italy’s The Games Machine the year before; the two accounts disagree over whose garage it was, PC Player placing it in Sperry’s father’s house and The Games Machine in Castle’s. The first money came from converting other publishers’ games, which paid for a 25-square-metre office in a Las Vegas office block called the Atrium.
Westwood Associates
The early years were mostly contract work, much of it for Epyx and SSI (the Westwood entry lists the games). Castle designed as well as programmed. DragonStrike (1990), SSI’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game in which the player took the role of a dragonrider, was nominated for Computer Gaming World’s simulation game of the year award with “Louis Castle and Brett Sperry” named as its creators, for “a unique subject matter, interesting role-playing shell, and entertaining variety of mission types”. On Sega’s Warriors of the Eternal Sun (1992) for the Mega Drive, the credits list him as designer and as one of five programmers.
He did not take all the praise he was offered. Looking back in 1998, he said Westwood had benefited from people giving it credit for things it had not done: the plaudits for Eye of the Beholder’s real-time dungeon, he said, really belonged to FTL’s Dungeon Master.
Art, Dune II and The Lion King
By 1993 Westwood had about 50 staff, and Castle, as vice-president of creative development, ran the art: classically trained animators drawing storyboards and pencil tests, as Computer Gaming World found on its tour of the studio. Five years later he told PC Player what he had been doing at the time: working on the Super Nintendo version of The Legend of Kyrandia, serving as art director on Lands of Lore, and turning over the idea of a strategy game that ran in real time, which became Dune 2.
Dune II (1992) set the pattern of harvesting, base building and unit production that real-time strategy followed, though it was not the first strategy game played in real time. Retro Gamer wrote in 2008 that Sperry and Castle were “equally instrumental” in taking the idea to the Dune licence, after Eye of the Beholder had shown them how exciting real-time decisions could be. Castle had no patience with the version of the story that started with Blizzard: in 1998 he complained to PC Player that Warcraft was often presented as the father of the genre, when Dune 2 had come out earlier and was every bit as good a game.
On the Mega Drive version of Virgin’s The Lion King (1994), made at Westwood, Castle was creative director and producer. It was one of the three projects he picked out in 2001 as his personal highlights, “all because of my close involvement”.
Command & Conquer
Castle’s accounts of Command & Conquer (1995) dwell on its setting. The story of a terrorist brotherhood and a world coalition fighting over Tiberium came, he told Retro Gamer, from the news of the time, the Gulf and the Balkans: “War was in the news and the threat of terrorism was on everyone’s mind. I think that’s what made it resonate with people, because it felt like it could happen any day. And of course it did.” He defended the filmed briefings with real actors, which Westwood kept long after rivals turned to rendered characters: “good human actors can convey an amazing amount of emotion.” Of the later games, he said that with Red Alert 2 and its Yuri’s Revenge expansion the team at Irvine “pretty much perfected real-time strategy in its time”.
Blade Runner
The game Castle named first among his favourites was Blade Runner (1997). When Edge visited in 1997, it found him in his thirties but acting “like a hyperactive schoolkid who has just remembered that tomorrow is Christmas”. He told the story in full to Edge in 2010. Westwood had little over a week to pitch for the licence, and the team crunched all weekend on a demo of the film’s opening, the Spinner landing, using the video compression written for Command & Conquer. Castle’s pitch was a game that would “add value rather than borrow it”: the player would be a new character in the film’s world while its story went on elsewhere, “behind the camera, amid things left unexplained, wallowing in the mythos”.
The licence came with no footage or music, because nobody knew who owned the rights to what, so every scene was rebuilt in 3D. When the first sets, built faithfully from Syd Mead’s concept drawings, looked wrong, Castle tracked down the engineer who had built the film’s sets from scrapyard parts, and had the artists work the same way. Westwood drew the characters as voxels, lit against pre-rendered backgrounds, because the graphics cards of the day could not have drawn them as polygons. The player’s own character would never be sure whether they were human or Replicant, and Castle wanted “a game where the uncertainty of what’s going to happen makes you quiver with anticipation every time you click the mouse”. By his account it outsold LucasArts’ The Curse of Monkey Island three to one and sold over a million copies, but four CDs and the licensing terms meant it “was not terribly profitable”. He ended the talks on a sequel himself.
Electronic Arts
When Electronic Arts bought Westwood from Virgin in 1998, Castle and Sperry agreed to stay for at least five years. Early in 1999 Castle, now executive vice-president and producer of Lands of Lore III, told PC Player that nothing had changed yet, and that Virgin’s American headquarters in Irvine had become a Westwood branch. He often spoke for the studio in these years: in 2001 he presented a new Westwood pirate game on stage at Microsoft’s pre-E3 Xbox event, and he took PC Gamer’s questions about Emperor: Battle for Dune, the online game Earth & Beyond and Command & Conquer: Renegade.
EA closed Westwood in 2003. Castle stayed with the company as vice-president of creative development at EA Los Angeles until 2009, and by 2003 Edge was introducing him simply as “EA’s Louis Castle”.
Later career
Castle left EA in 2009 to become chief executive of InstantAction, a browser-games company that owned GarageGames; InstantAction closed in November 2010. He went on to Zynga as vice-president of studios, and by his own account spent some years contracting for mobile games companies. In March 2017 Amazon Game Studios made him head of its Seattle studio, where the team’s multiplayer shooter Crucible came out in May 2020. In September 2022 he joined Deviation Games, a studio formed by former Call of Duty developers to make a game for PlayStation, after one of its founders left; Deviation closed in March 2024 without releasing a game.
Sources
- PC Player (Germany), November 1999, pp. 234–238: “Firmenhistorie: Westwood” (Century 23 Computers, Sperry at 21, Castle the student salesman with the printer, the Epyx job, Sperry’s father’s garage, the office in the Atrium); p. 38: interview with Castle (aged 34).
- PC Player (Germany), November 1996, pp. 72–73: interview with Brett Sperry (two people in 1985, about 120 at the 1995 celebration).
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 17, February 1994: Westwood feature (“created eight years ago by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle in a garage”).
- The Games Machine (Italy) issue 59, December 1993: Westwood history (its first home “del garage del brillante Louis Castle”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 71, May 1990: DragonStrike review (the player as a dragonrider). Issue 74, September 1990, p. 74: Games of the Year nominees, DragonStrike (“Louis Castle and Brett Sperry”).
- Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun (Sega, 1992) and The Lion King (Virgin Interactive, 1994), Mega Drive, on-screen credits; transcribed at Sega Retro (web, secondary). https://segaretro.org/Dungeons_%26_Dragons:_Warriors_of_the_Eternal_Sun and https://segaretro.org/The_Lion_King
- Computer Gaming World issue 109, August 1993, pp. 31–34: tour of Westwood Studios (Castle as vice-president of creative development; the art department).
- PC Player (Germany), February 1998, pp. 56–57: five-years-of-PC Player questionnaire, Louis Castle’s answers (Kyrandia on the Super Nintendo, Lands of Lore, the real-time strategy game that became Dune 2; Dungeon Master; Warcraft and Dune 2).
- Retro Gamer issue 48, 2008, pp. 69–75: “The History of Command & Conquer” (Sperry and Castle and the Dune licence; Castle on the story of Command & Conquer and on Red Alert 2; “L is for Louis Castle … now vice-president of EA Los Angeles”).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 96, May 2001, pp. 58–60: interview with Louis Castle (Las Vegas; his favourite projects; actors in the briefings; Emperor, Earth & Beyond, Renegade).
- Edge issue 49, September 1997: Blade Runner feature (Castle as vice-president and executive producer).
- Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010: “The Making Of Blade Runner”, with Louis Castle (the pitch, the licence, the sets, the voxels, the sales and the sequel).
- Computer Gaming World issue 172, November 1998, p. 58, and Edge issue 63, October 1998: EA buys Westwood; Castle and Sperry to stay for at least five years.
- PC Player (Germany), March 1999, pp. 24–25: interview with Louis Castle (EA; Irvine as a Westwood branch).
- PC Zone issue 73, February 1999: Lands of Lore III preview (Castle as executive vice-president and executive producer).
- Edge issue 99, July 2001: Microsoft’s pre-E3 Xbox conference (Castle presents Westwood’s pirate game).
- Edge issue 129, November 2003: “EA’s Louis Castle” among the judges of a festival award.
- Wikipedia, “Louis Castle” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): vice-president of creative development at EA Los Angeles until June 2009; InstantAction from July 2009, closed November 2010; Zynga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Castle
- “Interactive Entertainment Veteran Louis Castle Leaves EA to Join Browser-Based Gaming Innovator InstantAction”, Digital Commerce 360, 24 August 2009 (web, secondary). https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2009/08/24/interactive-entertainment-veteran-louis-castle-leaves-ea-to-join/
- “Command & Conquer co-creator Louis Castle to head Amazon Game Studios Seattle”, Game Developer, March 2017 (web, secondary): the Amazon appointment; his earlier posts at EA and Zynga. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-i-command-conquer-i-co-creator-louis-castle-to-head-amazon-game-studios-seattle
- Dean Takahashi, “Louis Castle interview: How Amazon labored for 5 years to make team shooter Crucible”, GamesBeat, 19 May 2020 (web, secondary): contracting for mobile companies before Amazon; Crucible’s release. https://gamesbeat.com/louis-castle-interview-how-amazon-labored-for-5-years-to-make-team-shooter-crucible/
- “Deviation Games’ co-founder leaves studio”, Game Rant, 12 September 2022 (web, secondary): Castle joins Deviation Games. https://gamerant.com/deviation-games-co-founder-jason-blundell-leaves-studio/
- “PlayStation-backed studio Deviation Games is shutting down”, Game Developer, March 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/playstation-backed-studio-deviation-games-is-shutting-down