News

The collaboration between Thatgamecompany's Sky: Children of Light and ocean conservation non-profit The Ocean Cleanup has raised nearly $2.5 million to fight ocean pollution. The indie developer thatgamecompany has been making artistic, meditative games since 2007, and Sky is its latest offering for fans. The free multiplayer game, which is a spiritual successor to the extraordinary 2007 experience, Journey, encourages player interaction and collaboration.

The Days of Nature event harnesses the compassion and sense of teamwork of the game's player base, and turns them into a force of goodwill. The annual event has returned to Sky for its fifth year, bringing the total amount of money raised for the cause since 2021 to nearly $2.5 million toward creating solutions to remove plastic from the world's oceans, according to a press release. Tim Nixon, Online Experience Director of thatgamecompany, said this about the partnership:

“This partnership continues to reinforce our belief that games should be a force for good.

Dark Souls is a series of titles known for being incredibly difficult and having a bleak atmosphere, setting, and narrative. It is, by all means, a lineup of games that are aimed towards a mature audience. It was also a series of titles that inspired many other studios to develop similar titles.

As one might expect, the titles that inspired FromSoftware and Hidetaka Miyazaki‘s brainchildren were also dark and grim, but there was also a title that might not fit that exact bill. Moreover, while the degree of similarity isn’t spectacular, it is undoubtedly uncanny and surprising.

An Mmo for all ages took inspiration from Dark Souls feature that isn’t talked about enough Soapstone messages in Dark Souls can be hilarious.

One thing about the titles from Hidetaka Miyazaki’s studio is that they might not try to create something entirely novel in terms of experience. Still,...

A new web series is giving its viewers a peek into the world of game design. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (Aias) has announced Game Makers, in which notable developers share the tips that have led the to the top of their industry.

The developers featured in Game Makers range from bigwigs like Metal Gear Solid’s Hideo Kojima to indie darlings like Journey’s Jenova Chen. Across the show’s ten episodes, its guests will discuss everything from design to story writing to the future of the industry. The Game Makers trailer gives off a bit of an “Inside the Actors Studio for gaming” feel in terms of how thoroughly its interviewees describe the process of game design.

“The landscape of storytelling in games has changed over the past few years,” said The Game Makers’ series creator and director Jennie Kong in a press release. “Video game and...

Flow and Flower developer thatgamecompany has rolled out a trio of ethereal pictures for a new project, its first since the release of the critically-adorned Journey four years ago.

Currently codenamed “thatnextgame,” the artsy images hail from the studio’s official Twitter feed, where Studio Co-Founder Jenova Chen teased that the as-yet-untitled experience is a “game about giving.” Of the three stills, the one to offer up the best indication of the game’s art style showcases an ancient archway, with a beam of light piercing through the clouds above. Elsewhere, there’s a silhouette of four children holding hands against a pastel blue backdrop, along with a pair of candles.

Can you decipher what these pictures are referring to?

We hope you’ll enjoy @thatnextgame, and in the meantime we’re hiring. pic.twitter.com/jkjOclSDAt

— thatgamecompany (@thatgamecompany) November 1, 2016

In tandem with the unveiling, thatgamecompany confirmed that it’s now actively hiring,...

If a listing on Sony’s PlayStation Store is to be believed, thatgamecompany’s serene, visually stunning platformer Journey will be weaving its way onto PlayStation 4 later this month.

According to the post, the critically-adorned title will hit the company’s current-gen hardware on July 21, though there is still no word of an announcement from either Sony or thatgamecompany. Either way, it’s been a long time coming, with the Japanese publisher revealing the port at Gamescom last year. Since then, all has been quiet on both fronts, but going off of this as-yet-unconfirmed listing, Journey‘s arrival on PS4 appears to be imminent.

Stepping in for Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen’s indie studio is Tricky Pixels, who will be handling the game’s transition from one generation to the next. Upon its initial unveiling, Sony noted that the PS4 version of Journey would run at 1080p, rendering the...

A screen from 2005's "Drakengard 2"

The action-rpg series from the defunct studio Cavia is back with "Deadly Premonition" developers Access Games at the helm, according to a recent Famitsu report.

The new game, simply titled "Drakengard 3," is being developed for the PS3 with a series-first female lead named Zero. She'll presumably follow in the footsetps of the leads of the previous PS2-era games, mixing hack and slash action with dragon-based aerial combat.

Whoa, that reminds me: what was the last dragon aerial combat game? It couldn't have been "Lair," could it? There had to have been something in the interim?

While the fiction of the series wasn't exactly deep (lots of high-fantasy stuff and inter-empire conflicts), what it lacked in complexity, it more than made up for in complication.

[Source: Famitsu via Siliconera]

Related posts:

Sony Got Majority Of 'Journey' Profits, Says Jenova Chen

Free SpotPass Content Coming To 'Fire Emblem Awakening' This...

Both "The Witcher" and the gunplay-heavy "Alan Wake" sequel are discounted as part of a "pick-5" sale on the PC download service.

The deal is that you pick five titles from a preselected list of not-too-old PC games, and you get them with a nice cut in the price. "The Witcher: Enhanced Edition" and "Alan Wanke: American Nightmare" are two of the highlights, going for $2.00 and $3.00 respectively. Telltale's "Back to the Future: The Game" ($5.00--the adventure game studio is well-represented here) and "Chronicles of Riddick: The Assault on Dark Athena" ($3.00) are another pair you might want to get if you don't currently have them.

You can check out the full list of titles on Gog.com.

Related posts:

Practice A Little Slice And Dice With The PS3-Exclusive 'Metal Gear Rising Revengeance' Vr Missions

Sony Got Majority Of 'Journey' Profits, Says Jenova Chen

--

Follow @MTVMultiplayer on Twitter and be...

Despite being a breakout success, thatgamecompany's "Journey" still isn't making any money for the studio. According to Jenova Chen, the majority of profits are being used recover the millions of dollars needed for the game's development

"Sony owns all the rights to the games, and they also make the majority of the profit off the games." Chen tells Joystiq.

"We were at a spot where, if we couldn’t figure out the next game, or find the next deal, then at the end of Journey we’d run out of money. When the game makes money, the money first goes back to pay back the money they’ve invested. So, that’s going to take a while – Journey cost multiple millions of dollars to make. Once that money is recouped, then we will get royalties."

Thankfully, Chen believes thatgamecompany will start to see those royalties from Sony's next batch of payouts.

It is 1am. I have spent the last hour or so tweeting with other online bloggers about the Oscars that were about to get underway. It was all very fitting as I had spent the last week or so trying to get hold of as many game developers as I could to talk about the upcoming “Video Game Baftas”. I read through my questions one last time as I click call on Skype. “Patrick?” says a bright voice.

The voice belonged to Jenova Chen. Chen is easily one of the most exciting talents in the whole gaming medium. He is was the creative director behind the games Flow and Flower (the latter not a sequel to the former). If you have been lucky enough to play his latest game Journey, you will know Chen is an artist and innovator. His mission goal is stated simply under his twitter account. “A...

By Joseph Leray

“Civilization V” designer Jon Shafer has successfully Kickstarted the first game from his recently-founded indie studio, Conifer Games -- less than a week after setting the funding campaign in motion, “At the Gates” has raised the $40,000 needed to finish the game. Kickstarter funding is probably a pretty rough sketch for fan enthusiasm, but it’s clear that Shafer has struck a nerve with fans of strategy games.

“At the Gates” is a strategy game set during the fall of the Roman Empire. It borrows some tropes from the “Civilization” series -- Shafer explains, for example, that it will include “goody huts” to encourage exploration -- but it also looks to innovate, especially with regard to resource management and combat, both of which are affected by the changing seasons. Fields dry out in the summer, and rivers freeze over in the winter, and keeping your cities and troops...

Coming out of Destructoid, how the tears of 25 testers saved "Journey," what would become the bestselling Psn game to date.

It wasn't a matter of the graphics needing improvement or any fundamental failure of the gameplay: apparently, Sony just didn't feel that after two years' development, "Journey" was where it needed to be emotionally for gamers. The ending wasn't testing well with users and Sony was ready to end their commitment to thatgamecompany's latest title. But with some coaxing, thatgamecompany founder Jenova Chen was able to get a third year out of Sony for continued development.

The problem was that "Journey" took a full four years to make.

During Chen's D.I.C.E. talk about the game's development (which our Kevin Kelly covered here), Chen discusses the challenges for his team in striking the right emotional tone for "Journey" even as they went unpaid into the last half year of development.

By Joseph Leray

Over the weekend, Gearbox Software president and magician Randy Pitchford tweeted to fans that there is a “100% chance of a level cap increase this year” for his company’s popular first-person shooter and RPG hybrid “Borderlands 2,” reiterating similar comments made by the game’s producer last month.

Pitchford followed up, though, by noting the chances are “ 50\50 on unforeseen consequences,” referring to a series of design problems the studio has run into while designing the update, detailed in a VentureBeat interview last week. Pitchford was blunt when describing the balancing and scaling issues that comes with raising the game’s level cap: “We’re gonna break our f**king game if we change the math.”

“We’re now in this world where we’re confronting the reality of what it means to do that work, and it’s terrifying and challenging,” Pitchford explained. “This is the fundamental thing about the game.

By Joseph Leray

Csc Corporate Domains, Inc. is a company that registers and safeguards website domains for clients, keeping URL squatters off of them and allowing the clients to keep their marketing plans a secret. One of those clients is, apparently, ZeniMax Media, the owners of Bethesda Softworks and id Software.

The games industry super sleuth known as Superannuation recently dug up a Csc-owned domain registration for wolfenstein-spiel.com, which suggests that a new “Wolfenstein” game is in the works. “Spiel” is German for “game.”

The domain registry ties into another “Wolfenstein”-related rumor: several online resumes for composers, engineers, and voice actors have mentioned a Machinegames-developed “Wolfenstein” game. Machinegames is a Swedish development studio currently working on an unnamed game using the id Tech 5 engine. ZeniMax acquired id Software (and the “Wolfenstein” intellectual property) in 2009 and snagged Machinegames a year later.

With ballooning development costs and Byzantine publishing and licensing deals,...

By Joseph Leray

I haven’t had a chance to talk about Klei Entertainment’s new game, “Don’t Starve” yet, even though it was announced last summer and has been in playable open beta for months now.

Thankfully, Klei -- the team behind “Shank” and “Mark of the Ninja” -- are updating “Don’t Starve” every two weeks, giving me an excuse to post about the “news.” This week, they’ll introduce an insanity mechanic to their open-world survival game, as evidenced by the teaser trailer above.

In any case, “Don’t Starve”’s hook is that it’s a survival sim with no quests, goals, or tutorials: a demon transports Wilson, a demure Gentleman Scientist, to a strange wilderness where he must survive long enough to get home. The mechanics revolve around gathering resources and crafting the tools and buildings you’ll need, but the in-game logic is kept deliberately murky,...

A few years ago the Brain Age games were all the rage with gamers and non-gamers. These experimental offerings featured new, and potentially beneficial non-game uses for the DS. Since the franchise went quiet after the release of Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes A Day! in 2005, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima has been working on crafting a whole new class of game to put Brain Age fans to the test in his latest release, Concentration Training. Anyone that picked up Brain Age and Brain Age 2 may have noticed that there aren't really any fundamental differences in the exercises that are offered in both games, tasking players with building their working memory through repeated bursts of short mentally stimulating activates. However, this release steps away from that format, and instead places its emphasis on building one's ability to focus on individual tasks for extended periods of time.

At the heart of...

In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart says his company's been actively and aggressively lobbying for the opportunity to develop another RPG set in the "Star Wars" universe.

The studio behind "Knights of the Old Republic II," "Fallout: New Vegas," and the upcoming "South Park: The Stick of Truth" would love to get their hands on the license in order to tell a story between the original and prequel trilogies.

We pitched a between-Episode III and Episode IV game [to LucasArts]. Because we think that timeframe is super interesting. It’s the fall of the Republic, the extermination of the Jedi, it’s Obi-Wan going off and making sure Luke is Ok. You have the Sith, but you have the extermination of all Force users except for very, very few. So it was an interesting time to set a game, and you know, Chris Avellone came up with a really cool story.

It was announced today thatgamecompany, makers of Flow, Flower, and Journey will be going multiplatform with their next title. thatgamecompany was able to raise $5.5 million from Benchmark Capital’s Mitch Lasky and will now be able to produce games on their own.

Jenova Chen thatgamecompany co-founder had this to say:

“Today I am please to announce thatgamecompany has raised funding to develop and release our games independently, This enables us to bring our games to more platforms and provide our players the highest quality experience at every point of contact,”

Chen didn’t mention anything about the next project that they are working on other than to say “the team is very excited about our new adventure” and more information about the title will be revealed “soon”. However, there is no chance that the first three games from thatgamecompany going multiplatform because they are owned by Sony.

Lasky had this...

Journey is one of the best reviewed games of the year, but it is also one of the best selling titles ever for the Psn. According to a thank you note written by Journey’s creative director Jenova Chen, the game has broken Psn sales records to become the fastest selling title in Psn history. Here is the what Chen wrote:

“Thanks to you, Journey has officially broken PlayStation Network and PlayStation Store sales records, surpassing all first and third-party games to become the fastest-selling game ever released in the Scea region on the PlayStation Network,”

In addition, Chen mentioned how the team at thatgamecompany has received an overwhelming amount of letters of support for the game, even more than they received for Flower. Chen also announced that the soundtrack to the game would be available in the near future, and as a thank you for all the support the...

Journey has become the fastest-selling digital release on the European and North American Psn Store. The game surpassed all first and third-party games to achieve the honour, announced Journey creator Jenova Chen. "Thanks to you, Journey has officially broken PlayStation Network and PlayStation Store sales records, surpassing all first and third-party games to become the fastest-selling game ever released in the Scea and Scee region on the PlayStation Network," writes Chen on the PlayStation Blog. "We have received more letters from fans in the two weeks since Journey's launch than we did for Flower over the past three years!" he added. Chen also revealed that the game's official soundtrack, which was composed by Austin (more)...

I’ve always thought that it was pointless to argue about whether videogames can be art. After all, “Art” is one of the most loosely defined words in any known language. A great athlete is sometimes said to be an artist on the field. Virginia Woolf wrote a couple of books about women who carefully construct their parties as a form of art. Really, everyone could be called an “artist” — except for maybe Brett Ratner. Roger Ebert seemed to realize this point when, after throwing down the gauntlet and declaring that videogames could never be art, he back-pedaled by cheerfully...

Set for release this winter, the documentary film Us and the Game Industry promises to explore the motivations of indie developers like thatgamecompany. Filmmaker Stephanie Beth tells us what she learned from a new era of rebellious entertainment

Something important is happening with games at the moment. It has nothing to do with the blockbusting mainstream success of Modern Warfare 3. It isn't about the increasing convergence of Hollywood movies and Triple Aaa interactive entertainment. It is about a quiet revolution in the indie sector, where small studios and even lone developers create offbeat subjective titles rather than noisy mega-bucks shoot-'em-ups.

Because, just as in movies, it is the game design outliers who are producing the most interesting work, and who speak about the future of the medium. Last week saw the release of Journey, a beautiful, elusive adventure game by the small La studio thatgamecompany. Set on a dying desert world,...

What happens when a bunch of designers from around the world get to show off some of their new, innovative, or just out there ideas at Gdc 2012 on the same stage where Flow and Katamari Damacy made their debuts?

Hit the jump to find out.

First up, Pietro Riva and Nicolo Todeschi of Team Focaccia showed off the prototype for their abstract shooter, Mirror Moon, where you use your "gun" to affect the alignment of nearby heavenly bodies and solve the spare, alien environment's puzzles. You can find a brief trailer for the game here.

Next up, Steve Zwink introduced his prototype, Scale, another Fps set in a colorful, Mario 64-style world. Zwink explained that your gun can scale everything in the world to solve puzzles. In one example, he jumped on the back of a butterfly, expanded its size, riding it to another location. In another instance, there was...

ThatGameCompany's Upcoming Psn exclusive, Journey, has been catching some flack from critics who feel the game's 2-3 hour length is too short. However, in a recent Q&A with members of the press Journey's creative director, Jenova Chen, made it clear that he disagrees entirely.

“We don't want to add any filler, because people are paying money to experience that,” he said. "If we add filler, that's disrespect." He continued by saying that as kids we have all the time in the world to sink into a long game, but as adults, “If its too long they won't have the time to enjoy it.” Therefore Journey's length was designed to be more like a movie. "The reason a film is designed between 90 minutes and 2 hours is so people can take the whole thing in. Two hours is kind of the golden time before people have to go to the bathroom.

Being one of the most interesting developers on the PS3, thatgamecompany are looking to new horizons now that their three game contract with Sony has ended. The small developer founded by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago are responsible for the critically acclaimed and artistic Flow and Flower.

Journey, which will be the studio’s third game on the Playstation 3 is looking to further the small teams artistic visions and will be hitting the Psn on the 14th March in Europe. However with the release of Journey comes the end of their exclusive contract with Playstation. Jenove Chen told Push Square,

“Right now we are very much exploring ways to bring our games to a bigger audience, beyond just PlayStation. We are still in the process of negotiating, but I hope that we can announce it [soon]. But right now it’s still in the process.”

Now that they’ve made a...

Flower developer thatgamecompany is hoping to bring its next game to multiple platforms. Speaking with Sony-focused gaming site Push Square, thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen revealed that the organisation is exploring new systems. "thatgamecompany had a three-game contract with Sony, so the past three games had to be Sony exclusive," Chen said. "Right now we are very much exploring ways to bring our games to a bigger audience, beyond just PlayStation. We are still in the process of negotiating, but I hope that we can announce it [soon]. But right now (more)...

Journey will be released on the European PlayStation Store in March, it has been announced. The game was rumoured for a March release after it was recently revealed to have gone gold. Writing on the PlayStation Blog, thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen confirmed that the "interactive parable" would in fact launch on March 14. "We started working on Journey right after Flower launched, and the past three years have flown by extremely fast. In these three years, we at thatgamecompany and our friends in Scea Santa Monica Studio have faced many challenges together and emerged stronger," writes Chen. "Much sweat and tears have been put into the development of the game, and many people have come and gone. "So for us, the journey in the game (more)...

Comic-Con International has unleashed the full schedule for Wednesday and Thursday for the San Diego Comic-Con 2011, and there is going to be a ton of stuff to keep you incredibly busy and entertained.

Like I've been saying it's never to early to start planning, and there is a ton of stuff here that we are looking forward to checking out. I've gone through the list and put exclamation points next to all of the events that we are looking forward to attending. What panels and events are you looking forward to?

We will be at Comic-Con in full force this year, bringing you everything you need and want to know about. We will also be having a GeekTyrant meet-up this year, which we announce soon.

See you at the con!

Wednesday July 20th

!!! 6:00-9:00 Special Sneak Peek Pilot Screenings: Alcatraz, Person of Interest, The Secret Circle, and Supernatural...

How would you act if you came upon an unfamiliar face in foreign lands? What if you couldn't talk to them and neither person knew who the other was? Would you help them? Walk away?

Indie dev studio thatgamecompany poses these questions in "Journey," an experimental game due out for the PlayStation 3 later this year. Tgc remains best known for their moving 2008 release "Flower" and fans of their work have eagerly been awaiting the studio's take on multiplayer game design. In "Journey," players wander a series of sandy, craggy abandoned landscapes as mute avatars wrapped in flowing robes. With no spoken dialogue and no text, you'll only have movement and distance as means to communicate with others. The game will throw challenges--windstorms, creatures, slippery summits to climb--in your way, all of which are better tackled with companions. But, the gameworld won't be a bustling virtual city like the New Marais of "Infamous 2." No,...

The Skinny: The Smithsonian gathered votes for its upcoming Art of Video Games and this week, I detail what I threw my weight behind. Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part four is here. The first part of Part Five is here. Today, I finish off by talking about my picks from the last decade or so.

Era 5: Next Generation, continued

GameCube

Adventure Genre

"Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door"

Even though there's a "Zelda" in the category--"The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker," to be specific--i voted for "Paper Mario" because of localization. There's a tricky art to the practice of taking the in-jokes and idioms of a game made in Japanese and making them work in other territories. It's led to unintentionally funny bad Engrish translations before in video games: the All Your Base meme of the early 2000s came from botched localization.

The annual Game Developer's Conference honors those who make the games that we collectively sink millions of dollars into buying each year. The week-long trade show is filled with events and activities that nod to this fact, such as the Game Design Challenge. This year, noted creatives Jason Rohrer ("Passage"), John Romero ("Doom") and Jenova Chen ("Flower") faced off in a competition to see who could create a game that is also a religion. Rohrer emerged victorious with his unique mod of Mojang's "Minecraft."

The core of Rohrer's idea is a game that can only be played by a single person at a time, based on the concept that spirituality grows out of chains of meaning. The idea is for the single-playthrough experience to be passed on through a series of players, eventually taking on the designation of a sort of holy relic.

Rohrer's mod is a single "Minecraft" world...

The premier international celebration of indie game design kicks off today. As I type, I'm in the air, wending my way to lovely Culver City to take in three days of what promises to be awesome hands-on and panel talks. Here's what I'm looking forward to from the programming:

Punk Rock M*****F*****

Brandon Boyer, Frank Lantz, Richard Lemarchand, John Sharp

Game culture is often thought of as naive, disposable and operating in a cultural vacuum, isolated from everything other than genre fiction and Japanese pop culture. Brandon Boyer, Frank Lantz, Richard Lemarchand and John Sharp beg to differ, and offer punk rock as a case in point. Punk demonstrates the ways in which pop culture can be simultaneously exuberant, naive, primal, critical, disposable and savvy, sophisticated, intellectual, and culturally self-aware, and is therefore a wonderful inspiration for videogames. These four old school punks will talk about the overt and hidden connections between games,...

Sony is running a special limited-time promotion today for one of their exclusive titles, flOw, and you can download it now for free! The special offer is only running until midnight Est tonight.

flOw was originally flash-based game was created by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark as part of Chen’s project for university. Chen want on to be a co-founder of ThatGameCompany where they re-designed flOw entirely to utilize PS3’s motion-sensing controllers and to include HD visuals.

This is only available in the United States or Canada and to access it, click on the make.believe icon upon logging in.

If you know nothing about the game, in it you control one of several creatures, each unique with their own special abilities. Your goal is to eat other organisms to evolve until you’re capable enough to swim to the bottom of the area.

If you dig this game,...

Though it sounds strange to say, few games have ever provided the rush that "Flower" does. The third release by thatgamecompany (Tgc), "Flower" is a downloadable PS3 game that provides a two-hour ride over open plains and through deep canyons. You use the console's Sixaxis motion controller to direct a current of wind that, along its journey, accumulates flower petals. You tilt the control, and the wind tilts with you, a mechanism only complicated by having to push a button (any button!) to spur the wind forward. In the six levels, all obliquely cast as a flower's "dream," you're asked to touch, and collect, petals with the ability to animate the environments around you, ones crafted with an eye toward evocative detail (the sway of grass, the range of colors, the shifting temperament of the weather) and scored to a delicate combination of melancholy music and twinkling sound effects. Sounds "artsy"? It is,...