In 2007, North Side started work on Bot Colony, the first video game to use English conversation with the characters as the main gameplay mechanic, both to control character movement and to converse. In March 2009, the company unveiled the Bot Colony prototype at GDC in San Francisco, and in May moved into new digs to accommodate growth. In 2010, the Bot Colony novel was published, introducing the 5th law of robotics (do as people do) – which became the conceptual basis of the game. After 5 years of R&D intensive development (we had to do R&D in NLU and 3D and develop the game at the same time!), the first two episodes of Bot Colony were launched on Steam Early Access by a 45 member team, then at its peak. At the beginning of June, the company had given notice to most of its workforce – 2 weeks before the release – as it was running run out of money. In our final 2 weeks, everybody pulled together to ship the game, and we shipped it on 16 June 2014. The project had cost over 20 million without any revenue coming in. A skeleton  group of core developers continued R&D work and we kept shipping updates to Bot Colony. The fact that Vision, the game engine used on the original Bot Colony, was discontinued following Microsoft’s acquisition of Havok was a major obstacle to continuing evolving the game.  In 2019, we ramped up work on Bot Colony, initially on Vision (Microsoft had provided source code access). In 2020, we started the port of code and assets to the Unreal engine. In August 2022, we decided to integrate ChatGPT from OpenAI with our real-time NLU engine to power a new generation of Bot Colony, Bot Colony _redux.

The demo of Bot Colony _redux was launched on Steam for Steam Next Fest on June 9, 2025 by a combined team working across 14 time zones.