It's been 18 months, eons in game industry time since my last blog entry.  Not long after that one I was contacted by my old colleague Chip Morningstar about an idea he had. 

Chip was hired shortly after me (employee #8 I think) at Lucasfilm Games, a little 1982 startup that grew a bit.  In an industry full of very smart people, he's still on my list of the top few of the most brilliant - at Lucasfilm we shared an office for a few years, which meant I got to be in on the birth of Habitat, the very first graphic virtual world, running on Commodore 64 computers and 300 baud modems. 

For those of you born since that era, this was a system considerably less powerful than your cell phone.  Not your smart phone, your first text-only 90's era dumber than a brick (and almost as big as one) cell phone. 

Chip coined the term Avatar in its current incarnation (and put up with my puns for years).  So when he asked me if I was interested in a new company he was thinking of putting together, I jumped at the chance.

We incorporated in November of last year, got our first seed funding in the following months, moved into actual offices in July, and (after doing some work we're still not allowed to disclose) started on our first game, which should be showing up in the iTunes store for the iPhone in January.

 It's a multiplayer action game that allows 8 players to play together in realtime, and we're also providing the software that makes it possible to 3rd party developers.  Our name is Suddenly Social, which is a bit ironic as being in that startup has put quite a crimp on my social life IRL.  But the game has been fun to create, and I'm looking forward to unveiling it officially.




It's been a wild ride.  The four current co-founders of the company worked together at Lucasfilm Games 25 years ago, and on good days we like to think of ourselves as "aging bad-asses".  On bad days, don't ask! 

I'll post more updates as we move forward, but for now consider the simplicity of Scissors-Rock-Paper and how it might change if 8 people were able to play it simultaneously online - if I attack Jim with Rock to his Scissors, but Sue is attacking me with Paper at the same time - well, you'll get to see it soon enough.