Peter Baustädter, Niki Laber, and Hannes Seifert founded the studio as Neo Software in January 1993 as they neared the completion of Whale's Voyage.

The game led Neo Software to early success, as did 1994's The Clue!, which sold over a million copies, and enabled the company to relocate from Seifert's house in Hirtenberg to offices in Vienna.

After Neo Software's Alien Nations sold more than a million copies in 1999, Computec Media acquired a majority stake in the company, seeking it to produce online games.

[2] After five years of independent work in the video game industry, Baustädter, Laber, and Seifert were nearing the completion of Whale's Voyage.

While meeting at a coffeehouse near Wien Westbahnhof railway station, they decided to build a company around the game, establishing Neo Software on 4 January 1993.

[5][6] The game's success allowed Neo Software to begin moving to the Business Park Vienna in 1994, which made it easier to hire international employees.

[1][7] In the following two years, Neo Software worked on Prototype, Dark Universe, Whale's Voyage II, and Cedric (all released in 1995),[8] as well as Mutation of J.B., Spherical Worlds, Black Viper, and Fightin' Spirit (all 1996).

The company expected Neo Software and its 11 employees to develop two online games and generate DM 7 million in revenue each year.

Alongside paying cash and shares, Gameplay.com entered into a "joint exploitation agreement" that allowed Take-Two to purchase Neo Software.

However, he lamented that the lack of widespread broadband connections in households at the time made games like Online Pirates unviable as mass-market products.

In a blog post, Rockstar Vienna designer Jurie Horneman described how he arrived at the studio to work, only to be turned away by security guards.

In a blog post listing all 89 missing credits, he stated that "the majority of the work we did at Rockstar Vienna is in the released game.

[36] Deep Silver Vienna's first game was Cursed Mountain, developed in association with Sproing Interactive and released for the Wii in 2009.

[38][39] On that day, Koch Media disestablished Deep Silver Vienna and laid off its 20 employees, citing that it was necessary to concentrate its operations at its Munich headquarters in the face of the "overall economic situation".