History of North Side and Bot Colony

North Side was founded by Eugene Joseph after his first company, Virtual Prototypes Inc., a developer of graphics tools for aerospace, went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in July 1999. While Virtual Prototypes tools used real-time data to animate 2D graphics, the vision for North Side was to use language to generate character animation in a 3D environment.

The concept of a bot game was born on a 2007 skiing trip to Whistler with Jonathan, Eugene's son, and included language parsing and reasoning (Alice killed Bill. Is Bill dead? Yes). North Side kicked off work on Bot Colony, the first video game to use English conversation with the characters as the main gameplay mechanic, both to control character movement and to converse.

In March 2009, the company unveiled the Bot Colony prototype at GDC in San Francisco, and in May moved into new digs to accommodate growth. In 2010, the Bot Colony novel was published, introducing the 5th law of robotics do as people do - which motivated the story of the game.

We were doing R&D on NLU in a 3D environment, and using the results in the game. We found it tough to develop core technology and build a game relying on it at the same time. After 5 years of hard work, the first two episodes of Bot Colony were launched on Steam Early Access by a 45 member team, then at its peak.

However, at the beginning of June, the company had given notice to most of its workforce - 2 weeks before the release - as it was running out of money. In our final 2 weeks together, everybody went all out to ship the game, and Bot Colony was released on Early Access on 16 June 2014. The project had cost over 20 million without any revenue coming in.

A skeleton group of core developers continued R&D work and we kept dropping updates to Bot Colony. Vision, the game engine used on the original Bot Colony, was discontinued following Microsoft’s acquisition of Havok, and this proved to be a major obstacle to continued development of the game.

We ramped up work on Bot Colony in 2019, initially on Vision after Microsoft provided source code access, but in 2020, we started the port of the code and assets to the Unreal engine. In August 2022, we decided to integrate ChatGPT from OpenAI with our real-time NLU engine to power a new generation of Bot Colony, Bot Colony _redux.

The demo of Bot Colony _redux was launched on Steam for Steam Next Fest on June 9, 2025 by a combined team working across 14 time zones, in Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia.

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