History

Winteryear Studios is the brainchild of Matthew R. Walsh.

Matthew was a child prodigy with computers. He was obsessed with them as soon as he realized what they were. In the 4th grade he often built computers out of wood blocks in day care, as hilarious as it was to bystanders at the time, it would only mark his lifelong obsession of technology.

Although his family was not financially able to own a computer, his aunt had recently purchased a family computer. A 133mhz Pentium-1 Packard Bell running Windows 95. Matthew and his cousin would stay up until dawn each night as his cousin taught him to program the Commodore-64 and showed him Qbasic. Around this time, Quake was released which immediately hooked Matthew on the possibility of stylistic, creative and innovative video games. Not far after, QuakeWorld was released and along with GameSpy, Matthews obsession to gaming was peaked at this very moment.

At age 10, after being hacked in an IRC chatroom, embarassingly by the trojan horse NetBus, Matthew became further obsessed with everything computers. Hacking, protocols, programming, scripting, internet communications, games. He wanted to learn it all. He started by writing black-hat mIRC scripts, specifically one which was released and named Pestilence.

At 10 years old, for selling thousands of dollars in computer equipment at weekend long computer shows, Matthew finally received his own computer as payment. The machine was an IBM PS/2 with nothing on it but MS-DOS. It had a beautifully loud Maxtor hard drive and the gorgeous steel bodied IBM clacking keyboard.

Isolated from the internet, without a Windows shell and nothing but a black command prompt staring him in the face, he began programming in the included demo version of Qbasic 1.1 and then quickly moved onto Qbasic 7.1.

Thanks to the upgrade in 7.1 which allowed assembly interrupts, Matthew began learning 80286 assembly and utilizing the assembly functionality in Qbasic providing his programs access to higher video resolutions, colors and even mouse support. Matthew, having a PC that only had DOS on it, began writing his own Graphical User Interface shells, like Windows, to give his computer a more modern usability; every system and function from graphics engines to font manager and beyond had to be coded from scratch. Around this time, Mathew wrote his own multitasking system and interpreted programming language, ApolloBasic. After writing many GUI's, Matthew moved on to learning Pascal for Mac and C languages.

Matthew began developing video games around the age of 13, coding the engines from scratch, building multiplayer replication systems at first over RS232 then over a custom IPX stack.

By the time Matthew was 14, he had developed a full-assembly bootloader (like lilo for Linux) and then two mainstream black-hat network security tools, one of which would still be used publically until 2016; both of which were on the Symantec Norton Antivirus list of dangerous applications.

As time, and his skills progressed, Matthew began his professional career at age 15 writing a 2D CAD system for the gutter industry to be run on tablets at customer locations which handled all design, costing, pricing, ordering and contracts. At 16, he developed a 3D engine and built a CAD system, similar to the gutter system, but for designing home roofs. He became a professional software engineer at 15 and financially independent.

Matthews carrer continued forward and involved many projects including the founding of his software company and subsequent software platforms with world-wide distribution.

Around October 2015, upon losing his mother to cancer, Matthew began writing a story to keep his thoughts as far from reality as possible, even though the story had loose elements of that pain and reality. He decided to move past his complacement in life and begin learning video game development in Unreal Engine, with the intention of bringing that story to life. That story is the basis of THE NEXT WORLD®

In 2017, through a mututal acquaintance, Matthew met Ron Wasserman who immediately was receptive to the production and began writing scores of music for the game.

Matthew reached a point where he could not continue without help. In 2017, he put out an ad to hire a 3D artist and signed John Lozano to assist him. Over the next few years several artists, riggers and animators were hired to assist; however, John remained the core component to 3D modelling production.

In 2021, while working on THE NEXT WORLD® which would need considerably more time to complete; Matthew devised a smaller, simpler game to bring to market -- the prototype of which was finished in just a few hours, however, discontent with ever making anything 'simple', all resources were rerouted to the new game for a few months until it's completion, that game also being scored by Ron Wasserman eventually became NEW TERRA® Not long after review, NEW TERRA® was accepted by Nintendo® for release on the Switch® and then Sony® for Playstation® 4 & 5.