Budapest, Hungary-based Neocore Games broke onto the scene back in 2008, but hit this year in a big way with their King Arthur the Role-Playing Game 
which scored a GDN Gold Award and a 9.0/10. The game also has a new expansion, The Saxons, which we will review shortly. They are also working on Lionheart: King’s Crusade (which I will write up separately), a strategy RPG set during the Third Crusade that pits Richard the Lionheart’s Crusaders against the Saracen. since we don’t see a lot of games coming out of Hungary, especially of this quality.
It turns out that Orsolya Tóth, Neocore Games PR Manager, is a lifelong gamer, having picked up the hobby back when she was six. She still loves the old-school Prince of Persia games along with Heroes of Might & Magic 3 and 4. When asked about her favorite games she said, "well I’m a girl, so I like the Sims of course," which made me laugh. She’s going to kill me when she sees I nabbed a photo for this article...
In regards to how she got involved with Neocore she told me that a group of her poker buddies called her up one day and asked her to come on board to do
PR/marketing. That’s truly a good set of pals and it seems we’re all lucky that they weren’t bluffing.
The Hungarian gaming market, she tells me, is loaded with PC strategies both played and being made. Considering the utter coolness of King Arthur and Lionheart, it seems that we might expect a continuous line of these great games coming out of the country.
Neocore is currently around 20 people with some other part-time help. Having seen and played King Arthur and loved it you can see the power of a tightly-knit group who have a passion for what they do and are given a chance to do it. So I thought we might delve deeper into the history of the company.
When asked about the founding of the company I was told that "Neocore Games represents the venerable old-school approach to game development." It was founded by three young men who wanted to earn a living by doing what they loved the most: computer games. The main goal was to combine serious work with their devotion to strategies and RPG games.
