In April 2000, Origin Systems founders Richard Garriott and Robert Garriott, along with former Origin employee Starr Long, founded Destination Games to produce multiplayer online titles. The name 'Destination Games' was meant as a pun on the name of Origin Systems, the famous development studio the Garriott brothers had founded two decades earlier.
In 2001, NCSoft, eager to gain a bigger foothold in the West, acquired Destination Games, and made them part of NC Interactive, NCSoft's American arm, and moving NCSoft's North American headquarters from California to Austin, Texas. For the next few years, the company (by then renamed NCSoft Austin) focused on localizing and supporting Lineage. In 2004, NCSoft released both City of Heroes and Lineage II on the same day, and NCSoft Austin focused on Lineage II.
After their involvement in almost every other NCSoft release in the West -- including Lineage, Lineage II, City of Heroes and Auto Assault, Destination Games released the first title they'd developed, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, in 2007. As sales and subscriptions were not what NCSoft expected, the decision was made to close down Tabula Rasa; and NCSoft Austin was merged, along with NCSoft's other Western development teams, into NCSoft West.
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