Monolith Productions

Monolith Productions was founded on 25 October 1994 and was based in Kirkland, Washington. Several of its seven founders, among them Jace Hall and Brian Goble, worked at the software company Edmark and met up regularly to play Doom. They picked the name because it sounded a little mysterious, was not taken and had eight letters, the most DOS filenames allowed. Microsoft hired them to make gaming CDs showing off Windows 95 and DirectX, and for a while they worked out of its Redmond campus.

A significant investment from Japanese publisher Takarajimasha gave it its own offices and full-time production by 1996. While working on Claw it bought Q Studios, which was finishing Blood (1997), one of the last games built on the Build engine. At the same time it was creating its own 3D engine, LithTech, which debuted with Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (1998) and powered most of its games. Between 1997 and 1999 it also published titles of its own and from other developers, before signing deals with Interplay and Fox Interactive.

That period produced No One Lives Forever (2000), Aliens vs. Predator 2 (2001), No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way (2002) and Tron 2.0 (2003). In August 2004 it was bought by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, now Warner Bros. Games, and went on to make F.E.A.R. (2005), Condemned: Criminal Origins (2005), F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (2009) and Gotham City Impostors (2012). In 2014 it released Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, followed in 2017 by Middle-earth: Shadow of War.

In 2021 it announced a game starring Wonder Woman, which never came out. On 25 February 2025 Warner Bros. Games announced the closure of Monolith, along with Player First Games and WB Games San Diego, as part of a restructuring in which it cancelled Wonder Woman to focus on its core franchises. It brought more than thirty years of the studio's history to an end.