Westwood Studios (known as Westwood Associates from 1985 to 1992) was a video game development company founded in 1985 by Louis Castle and Brett Sperry, and specialized in role-playing games and real-time strategies. The studio was famous for popularizing the real-time strategy genre with Dune II and their proprietary Command & Conquer series. Following a peak of popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s under the leadership of Virgin Interactive and, later, Electronic Arts, the studio was disbanded in 2003.