At game expo, stakes are high for Mass. firms

This is the week of E3 — the Electronic Entertainment Expo — where the world’s video game companies come together to showcase their wares.

Of the Massachusetts companies unveiling games, those with the most at stake were Harmonix Music Systems Inc. of Cambridge developer of the Rock Band and Dance Central music video games, and Quick Hit Inc. of Foxborough. Yesterday, Quick Hit said it is being acquired by a New Jersey game maker, Majesco Entertainment Co.

Harmonix has been struggling.

In February, it said it would lay off nearly 40 employees, amid sales so weak that its parent company, Viacom/MTV Games, unloaded Harmonix in a fire sale to a private investment firm.

At E3 this week, Harmonix revealed the sequel to the original Dance Central, an Xbox 360-exclusive title that was one of the first games built on Microsoft’s Kinect motion-capture technology. The Microsoft Kinect game-control system includes cameras that “read’’ a player’s body movements and translate them into on-screen actions.

Like its predecessor, Dance Central 2 features full-body motion capture without the need for a hand-held game controller, which has distinguished Kinect from rival platforms like Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s Move.

The original Dance Central was developed in parallel to the Kinect system and introduced at last year’s E3 show. It has since sold 2.5 million copies, said Kasson Crooker, senior producer at Harmonix. The sequel adds real-time multiplayer capabilities, allowing two people to dance their way to game glory in tandem.

“We just wanted to get people dancing together,’’ Crooker said.

Dance Central has been important to the success of Microsoft’s Kinect, said Will Tuttle, editor in chief at GameSpy.com.

“Harmonix adapted and embraced Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral, making Dance Central the system’s first killer app,’’ he said.

In 2009, during the launch of the Beatles edition of its Rock Band game franchise, the company erected mock concert stages and had one of the largest booths at the show. Last year, Harmonix had its own booth and dance floors created to show off the new Dance Central. This year, Harmonix was relegated to sharing space with five other Kinect games inside Microsoft’s booth.

The problem for Harmonix has been a rapid decline in the popularity of music games.

In December, the company was bought by a New York investment firm, Columbus Nova LLC, for a token cash payment of $50 and the assumption of $100 million in liabilities.

Quick Hit, the Foxborough game maker, said yesterday that it had in effect been sold. For $836,000, Majesco will acquire a variety of Quick Hit’s assets and will operate Quick Hit Football, an online game licensed by the National Football League.

Majesco will hire Quick Hit’s 12 employees.

Quick Hit’s chief executive, Jeffrey Anderson, will become Majesco’s senior vice president of social games, and the company’s entire social gaming effort will be based in Foxborough.

Anderson said that being owned by a publicly traded company would help speed the growth of Quick Hit Football.

“We’re looking to grow the business, and we’re excited about where Majesco is going,’’ he said.

Quick Hit Football currently has 4 million registered users; it attracted about 750,000 unique players per month during the NFL season.

Other Massachusetts game makers with news at E3 included Irrational Games of Quincy, home of the Bioshock game franchise, and Turbine Inc. in Needham, developer of Lord of the Rings Online.

On Monday, Irrational’s creative director, Ken Levine, said it will produce a version of its upcoming Bioshock Infinite game compatible with Sony’s PlayStation Move motion capture system.

Levine also said he had an unnamed pet project in the works: a Bioshock game for Sony’s new PlayStation Vita hand-held system.

Turbine announced the Rise of Isengard expansion pack, which adds three new regions of Middle Earth for players to explore.

E3 runs through tomorrow at the Los Angeles Convention Center. More than 45,000 people attended last year’s expo.

Hiawatha Bray of the Globe staff contributed to this report.