Dave Jones: Realtime Worlds' next game will be online and mobile - UPDATE
Portable fun [NOT] promised from the creator of original GTA
[Editor's note: Realtime Worlds is NOT making a persistent server-based mobile game. Jon misheard. We suspect Newcastle Brown Ale or small cochlea (possibly both) had something to do with it. Apologies. And we're leaving the story up so it doesn't become some sort of conspiracy theory. The company's next online, persistent server-based game will be announced in 2010 though.]
You might not know the man himself, but you’ve definitely played some of Dave Jones’ games, which range from Lemmings to GTAs 1 & 2, and Crackdown on Xbox 360.
The founder and creative director at Scottish developer Realtime Worlds is currently working with his team on the hotly anticipated PC MMOG All Points Bulletin, but at the Game Horizon conference in Newcastle, UK, he revealed the studio has another online game in development, and it’s mobile.
Indeed, it’s going to be a mobile, persistent, server-based game.
There aren’t any further details as it won’t be officially be announced until 2010, but in a wide ranging talk about what Realtime Worlds has learnt from making APB, Jones said the unannounced project was even more ambitious in scope. Indeed, Realtime Worlds’ first $30 million in venture capital funding was gained on the back of this project, apparently.
Quite what it could be, at this stage, we have no idea other than Jones said it would be completely different in tone from APB, which effectively is a game of Cops versus Robbers. However, considering the time Jones has spent looking at the how the Korean online gaming market works, we’d expect it to be casual and micro-transaction-based.
And the only mobile platform in the West that can currently do this is iPhone, although before the speculation gets too heated, we should point out that when Realtime Worlds gained its first round of money, iPhone hadn’t been invented.
More as it breaks folks...
