14 DAY TRIAL // 2K Games, the publisher of notable video game properties Borderlands and BioShock, has announced the creation of a brand new development studio, called Hangar 13 Games, today.
The new studio is to be led by Haden Blackman, the creative director of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and producer of Star Wars: Galaxies. For the time being, the team he leads is working on a yet unannounced title and also developing some proprietary technology to support its goals.
That sounds intriguing, but unfortunately, both Blackman and 2K Games have been very tight-lipped about what's going on.
The studio is based on Novato, California, and Blackman has revealed that Hangar 13 is built around two key concepts, innovative tech and narrative.
Expanding on the "every player's story is unique" mantra cited by the developer, he said that he didn't just mean a branching storyline, but an actual story about our experience within the game, our moment-to-moment emotions and states of mind, and the player story that we can then share with the world.
"For me, when I look back at my history with games and experiences playing as a kid, that was what was always most exciting, when I could sit down with my brother and compare notes on how we played the games and they allowed us to approach things in dramatically different ways," Blackman has told GamesIndustry.
A focus on creative freedom
Blackman has pointed to the Dungeons & Dragons experiences of his youth, to how the game allowed players to build their own adventures and parties and to experience an entirely new journey each time, using the same pieces.
Talking about working with proprietary technology, Blackman notes that the ability to build something from the ground up is liberating and enables the team to channel its creativity into something truly engrossing, not just to retrofit a certain game vision into something compatible with existing technology, or to try to modify existing tech that might not be the best fit for that vision.
He says that his ambition is to make AAA games, but that he is concerned not to inflate the ranks of the members so much that he doesn't know everyone.
The core team is already assembled, and Blackman claims that he trusts that his vision can be realized with a smaller team, and not the usual AAA-sized staff associated with ambitious projects.
The team comes from a wide variety of studios, with years of experience developing a wide assortment of different genres, from Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed to Dead Space and Star Wars games.
For the time being, the studio is still hiring, and there is no clear timeline of when a game announcement will be made.
