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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Akira Yamoaka, famous for his musical and directorial contributions to Silent Hill, recently ended his longtime employment at Konami. That publisher’s loss is quirky developer Grasshopper Manufacture’s gain, as Yamaoka has signed on with Goichi Suda’s studio, according to Famitsu.
It’s hard not to get excited about the return of American McGee’s Alice.
Deadly jumping jacks, a vivisected dormouse, and a suicidal Alice were the products of famed designer American McGee’s first trip through the looking glass. There’s no telling where his second will take us.
Electronic Arts is teaming up with Spicy Horse and American McGee to create a sequel to Electronic Art’s PC classic from 2000.
Red Eagle Games have signed a worldwide distribution deal with EA Partners to distribute games based on Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels.
Oh God… they got Jamil, too! Jamil Moledina, the former director of the Game Developers Conference and executive producer of the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards, has been absorbed into the EA collective. Moledina left his previous position in August to pursue “other interests.”
Lock up your developers, Japanese publishers. Your daughters are fine, but EA is about to come knockin’, snatching away your best local talent for its EA Partners program. The mega-publisher announced last month that it had signed Grasshopper Manufacture by way of Q Entertainment for an upcoming horror game, adding the developer to a stable that includes Valve, id Software, Epic Games and People Can Fly.
According to an MTV Multiplayer discussion with EA Partners group general manager David DeMartini, Suda51 and Shinji Mikami aren’t the only Japanese talent the pub has its eye on.
Gamasutra has a nice five page interview up with David DeMartini of EA Partners, the Electronic Arts division that has released games like Rock Band, Crysis, The Orange Box, and, uh, Hellgate: London in the past year. It’s a pretty wide ranging chat, from discussions of the challenges the come with working with Japanese studios, to acquiring new titles, to the relative disaster of Hellgate:
We’re certainly sad with the results for Flagship and what’s happened with Hellgate, because at the time we signed it, we were trying to get involved in a very complicated relationship between Namco and Flagship. We were coming late to the party, and trying to do whatever we could to sprinkle the game magic on the project and get it headed in the right direction.
I think that’s an example where all three parties had the best interest of the game in mind, and sometimes the game doesn’t work out. Hellgate is still an incredible concept. The guys who worked on it spent thousands of hours trying to make that concept work, and sometimes we just don’t see something. Sometimes, we just didn’t take enough time. Sometimes, things don’t work out the way you expect.
It’s kind of like a film with all big stars — on the script, it should be successful, but the movie doesn’t turn out as good as everybody hoped. That’s why EAP takes a portfolio approach with its games. You have to place a lot of bets, and hope for a lot of hits.
Certainly worth a read through — I always enjoy reading interviews that cover a lot of ground, and this certainly satisfies in that respect.
David DeMartini on the Renaissance of EA Partners [Gamasutra]
