53.2 F
Laguna Hills
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
-Advertisement-

Gaming Vets Sign on for Own Adventure

An Irvine startup launched by a trio of former developers at Blizzard Entertainment Inc. and Riot Games is ready to launch its first title.

Frostkeep Studios plans a spring release of “Rend,” a fantasy survival game that incorporates other genres.

The new venture adds to Orange County’s already strong base of video game publishers and highlights the many ties between its earliest companies.

Call it a comeback of sorts for co-founders Jeremy Wood, Mat Milizia and Solomon Lee, who worked on the original “World of Warcraft” more than a decade ago. That game spawned a franchise at Irvine-based Blizzard, generating billions of dollars while ushering in the era of the “massively multiplayer role-playing game.”

The men rose through the ranks in the industry, though their roles shifted in recent years toward management over development.

“We got away from the low-level grassroots,” Milizia said.

“We’re actually getting into the nitty-gritty. We wanted to get back into that,” Wood said. “It was like coming home again.”

The company has kept a low profile for about a year as its small team brainstormed ideas and worked on code to establish a fantasy world where players align with one of three factions and team up with others to battle enemy armies and creatures.

Wood, 37, spent a decade at Blizzard, helping to lay the foundation of what would become the first-person shooter “Overwatch,” Blizzard’s first franchise in 18 years and a game that’s amassed more than 25 million registered players since its May release. He most recently served as technical director at Aliso Viejo-based Carbine Studios, where in 2014 he helped launch “Wildstar,” a sci-fi massively multiplayer online game that allows friends and strangers to meet up on adventures and challenges on fictional planet Nexus.

Lee, 42, spent nine years at Carbine as lead effects artist and more recently served as principal VFX artist at Los Angeles-based Riot Games, the publisher of “League of Legends,” which has evolved into one of the most popular esports tournaments in the world.

Milizia, 37, is a 3-D artist who created thousands of props, zones, weapons and battlegrounds for World of Warcraft before joining Carbine, where he led the world, prop and rendering team and helped define the art style of “Wildstar.” He most recently served as art director on one of Riot’s closely guarded research and development projects.

The company has enlisted a few more specialists at its 300-square-foot headquarters at the Spectrum, including 3-D artist James Morford, who spent a year at Newport Beach-based inXile Entertainment working on “Wasteland 2,” and software engineer Jordan Leithart, another Carbine alumnus.

Composer Neal Acree, whose gaming credits include “World of Warcraft,” “Starcraft II,” and “Diablo III,” has been contracted to score “Rend.”

Frostkeep is running alpha tests of the game with about 60 friends and relatives before opening up tests to the public. More than 13,000 gamers have signed up for early access to “Rend,” which will be available on Stream’s gaming store.

Bootstrapped

The company was launched with founders’ capital and isn’t seeking investors.

“We are basically beholden to one another and our players,” Wood said. “We don’t have to please the money guys.”

That mentality is in vogue these days at independent gaming studios as the business model shifts. Gaming engines developed by the likes of San Francisco-based Unity Technologies and Epic Games Inc. in North Carolina no longer require an upfront cost, which has sometimes been hundreds of thousands of dollars—to license the technology at the outset. Now gaming developers pay them a percentage on the back end after a game has been released.

Lee said, “There’s never been a greater opportunity to be an independent game developer than now.”

Want more from the best local business newspaper in the country?

Sign-up for our FREE Daily eNews update to get the latest Orange County news delivered right to your inbox!

-Advertisement-

Featured Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-

Related Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-