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Xbox Creator's New Mobile Team Is Ready To Impress
Last week, we reported on how Seamus Blackley, one of the architects of Microsoft's original Xbox was founding a mobile game studio with a group of Atari arcade veterans. Now Blackley has commented on how the future of games may look a lot like its history.
Given THQ’s gradually sinking stock, you’d wonder why Blackley would choose to team up with the publisher. Blackley recently told Eurogamer, "We're prototyping everything on iOS and they may well come out on iOS, but there are games that we have that could fit on all sorts of different platforms, and having a partner who can do some marketing and can scale to the other platforms is really useful.”
He also added, “I think that several publishers have been through this before. A couple of years ago EA was going to go out of business, and before that it was Vivendi in the toilet. It's all cyclical. This is particularly bad for THQ for reasons that I don't entirely understand but the idea that the management have of backing games is the right one."
Blackley went on to recount the details about how he came to form a mobile games studio with a team of old Atari developers:
"[Back in 1983] the industry collapses and these guys go off to the four winds," Blackley says, “One of them writes the spacecraft operating system, a bunch of them go to Apple, Bruce ran the iMac program, Rich Adam went to EA and wrote Madden Football with Trip Hawkins and went on to start the PGA Golf franchise...
Blackley met this eclectic bunch at an industry party, and was immediately struck by the group's brilliance.
"You expect to go to a party and talk to a bunch of guys about the old days,” Blackley adds, “but instead they're all standing around an iPhone and commenting on the design. They're all still playing games and they're all still really f---ing smart.”
Blackley’s new studio, Innovative Leisure, is set to release its first title later this summer. We look forward to seeing what this talented team can do.
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