Civilization IV designer, Soren Johnson has launched a new studio called Mohawk Games.
It’s been founded by Soren Johnson, Dorian Newcomb and myself. Soren, as CEO comes up with what games we’re going to make and is also the creative director for the company. Dorian, the art director of Civilization V is in charge of how the games will look and feel. And me? As President, my job is to make sure Soren and Dorian have the necessary resources necessary to get the job done.
The first project is code-named Mars which will be using Oxide’s recently announced Nitrous 3D engine. We won’t have anything we can publicly show for awhile but I think strategy gamers are going to be very pleased with it.
As an industry, we’re entering an exciting new age. With retail finally officially dead (as far as PC games are concerned) and with 64-bit, multi-core game development finally having arrived, we are finally free to create some amazing, innovative strategy games that are also commercially viable.
During the retail age, people bought their games at the store and if the game wasn’t at the store, it wasn’t commercially viable. As a result, game developers were either “indies” making very small games or they were huge (>$20 million), AAA titles that were increasingly “safe bets” in order to get onto store shelves.
Now that PC gamers are comfortable going to Steam, you can create exciting and new types of games. These games can take a bit of a risk because there’s infinite shelf space for well crafted games. And with a reasonable budget (still millions but nothing like $20 million) combined with 64-bit (for handling gorgeous scenes that were getting very hard to do in a 32-bit strategy game since they have to hold all the world in memory at once) we can have games that are both innovative and visually stunning.
That’s Mohawk’s mission. To create awesome core strategy games for this new age of gaming. We’re in for some exciting times!