Google has acquired the Santa Clara-based gaming company Green Throttle, which made an Android-based game system and controller, fuelling speculation it will offer its own console or set-top box.

Two of the three founders of Green Throttle Gaming – Matt Crowley, formerly of Nokia and Palm, and Karl Townsend, who was lead engineer on the original and second generation Palm Pilot handheld computers released in the late 1990s – have joined the search giant in the deal.

Pando Daily, which first reported the Green Throttle acquisition, said its sources indicated that the “parts and labour” from Green Throttle would be used to help Google’s internal development of a new Google TV replacement device, potentially under the Nexus brand as reported by technology newsletter The Information at the end of 2013.

Google confirmed the acquisition but did not elaborate on the specifics of their forthcoming roles within the company.

Charles Huang, co-founder of Guitar Hero creator RedOctane, will not join Google and will retain the rights to the Green Throttle brand.

Google TV was launched amid fanfare in October 2010, but it struggled badly, with Logitech, the maker of an early set-top box, losing millions of dollars on it. Last year Google launched Chromecast, a small plug-in attachment for TV sets which could play content from the web; Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of ChromeOS and Android, said last week that it had sold “millions” of them in the US and would expand to other countries soon.

Controllers and Android consoles

Green Throttle Gaming created an Android app which was necessary to use its “Atlas” controller, which resembled a Microsoft Xbox 360 joypad but connected via Bluetooth to Android phones and tablets.

But the company pulled its Android app from the Google Play store in November 2013. Figures from Google Play suggest that the app had had only a few thousand downloads, which in turn suggests that too few controllers had sold to create a sustainable business. However it continued to sell the Atlas controller through Amazon despite the lack of necessary app support.

The purchase gives Google the assets required to create its own set top box, similar to the Apple TV or the Android-based games console Ouya. A report from the Wall Street Journal indicated that Google was developing its own gaming console in 2013, capitalising on the large library and success of Android smartphone and tablet games.

A further report detailed a Google-developed set top box with a camera and motion sensor, similar to Microsoft’s Kinect motion tracking system for the Xbox.

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