Ex-Pandemic founder starts social studio
Remember Pandemic? Responsible for the excellent Star Wars: Battlefront, the pretty good Saboteur and the downright awful Lord of the Rings: Conquest? EA disbanded the developer a few years back but now one of the studio’s founders has started up a new team focused on social software.
Greg Borrud from the studio has teamed up with Vivendi’s Chris Miller and Eric Gewirtz to form Seismic Games based in Los Angeles.
Borrud, now CEO, told GamesIndustry.biz: “We want something to happen in the real world and someone says ‘hey, I wonder how they’re handling this in the game” and they’ll jump into the game.”
The dev also assured that this move wasn’t simply to join the social gaming ‘gold rush’.
“We can kind of work in any business we wanted to work in,” Borrud continued, “and I think that’s important thing. We chose social games because that’s what’s new, that’s what fresh and interesting.
“So what attracted us to social games is not only that opportunity to be a little more… to take a few more risks. You can take more of a risk in this industry because the variables are much more reasonable, with traditional games… believe me, I’ve sat in so many meetings where everyone is completely risk averse, and you can see that [if] you look at the top ten.”
The team’s new game is yet to be unveiled, but it certainly sounds like it will have a unique twist.
