A New Plan
Dear friends,
This morning, after nineteen years in Manchester, we are moving into an office downtown - it's a big step for us! For almost all of our history, we've been a service company, providing award-winning narrative and game design services to a huge variety of developers and publishers. We had one experiment with developing an indie game back in 2006 Play with Fire. If you don't know it, you ought to check out the trailer and marvel at how much it looks like a Minecraft mod, even though it couldn't possibly have been so!
Recently, I've been getting the itch to try our hand at game development again. Only if we're going to do it, it has to be more than just a side project - it has to be a whole new branch of our operation. And that's the plan. ihobo Games is an attempt to get our company into both development and publishing, with a very specific plan of attack. Now that a hundred of you have signed up for the Newsletter, I'm ready to share that plan with you.
Innovative, EuroBritish, Heirloom Games
Our new games wing exists to implement fresh game ideas ("Innovative") that have a British and European perspective ("EuroBritish"), and that have strong roots in the history of videogames ("Heirloom"). Our plan is to make games that honour and pay tribute to classic games - new and old - while finding novel and inventive spins on their gameplay and narrative designs. These 'heirloom games' could be retrogames, or they could simply be a means of passing the player practices of games we've loved onto a new generation. That's what great game development is about - passing something on to the future that was inspired by what we loved in the past.
The Master Plan...
With this in mind, there are currently five phases on the drawing board. We might tackle these by growing our own newly-founded development teams (which are moving into the new office this morning) or by partnering with other companies, but these are the projects we are hoping to fulfil in the next decade or so.
Phase I: 8 and 16 Bit Heirloom Games
We have two Heirloom games currently in production, both of which pay tribute to classic games of the 1980s. The first of these is going to be announced at AdventureX on Saturday (and we'll share the details with you soon after).
Phase II: 32 Bit Heirloom Games
At some point, we want to make tributes to the great games of the early 90s... and although we have some ideas, we haven't committed to anything specific for this phase yet.
Phase III: Requia Noir
It gives me great pleasure to announce my intention to take on the challenge of creating a spiritual successor to Discworld Noir in this phase. Rhianna Pratchett (who worked with International Hobo back in the 2000s) has said there are no plans to make any more Discworld games, but we are confident we can make a game that pays tribute to Terry's wonderful fantasy books and to Discworld Noir without having to make it expressly set on the Discworld. That's what the project code-named 'Requia Noir' is all about.
Phase IV
Ants try to communicate with humanity - with horrific results!*
*If you don't know what this refers to, put 'Phase IV' and '1974' into a search engine.
Phase V: Haunters, Inc
Finally, some time before I retire or die, I hope to be able to produce a spiritual successor to the game I am most proud of as a game designer: Ghost Master. This project, code-named 'Haunters, Inc', would be a rendered pseudo-isometric strategy game featuring the same kind of puzzle-infused Mission: Impossible style haunting scenarios that made the original game a cult classic.
Where You Come In...
Although International Hobo is well connected in the games industry, we're still going to need a lot of help to make this ambitious plan come to fruition. Over the months ahead, we'll be posting a variety of requests for help of all different kinds to make these dreams into a reality.
Thank you for supporting International Hobo! I hope that by pursuing these projects, we can make a lot of players' dreams come true.
Whatever dream you're working on, keep going!
Chris.
Want to talk to us about this news? Email us at friends@ihobo.com and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.