Amy Hennig, acclaimed writer and director on Uncharted, Soul Reaver, and Legacy of Kain, has announced that she is starting a new studio in collaboration with Skydance Media (via GameSpot).Â
Thrilled to announce that I’m joining the Skydance creative team in a venture to explore new frontiers in interactive storytelling! https://t.co/TFgRK2iYen
— Amy Hennig (@amy_hennig) November 18, 2019
Skydance Media is known for films and television series like Annihilation, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Grace and Frankie. (An aside: if you haven’t seen Annihilation, you should give it a try, because it’s ridiculously good.) It has brought Hennig into the fold to direct its new game development label, and she expressed her excitement and gratitude for the opportunity. “If you look around, like almost every entertainment company in Hollywood has some sort of interactive division, but they vary in terms of how serious they are about it, or how much they even understand it,” Hennig explained in an interview with VentureBeat. “For me with Skydance, it feels like a shared DNA.”
Hennig is joined by Julian Beak, her former co-worker at Electronic Arts who has over 30 productions under his belt like LittleBigPlanet, Battlefield, and Crime Scene Investigation. Skydance CEO David Ellison called the two “creative and visionary leaders” in the shifting interactive media sphere. Hennig and Beak will take on a team of budding game developers in the Bay Area and at Skydance Media’s headquarters in Santa Monica, California. The new studio’s goal is to create games that appeal to all audiences with engaging and gripping stories in a period where streaming seems to reign supreme.Â
“There’s so much pressure to create these monolith games that are so huge and more focused on live services and open the world aspects. Which are great, right?,” she added. “But my sweet spot is authored narrative. And so, what I was looking at, as I was doing my tour of industry, was—everything I heard from my gamer friends—that we want that content. That is what we are missing, the kind of shorter form, focused, narrative interactive content.”
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