iLounge

Neil Young, former head of Electronic Arts’ Blueprint studio, has left the firm to form Ngmoco, a new iPhone-focused gaming studio. In an interview with Gamasutra, Young described his departure as amicable, saying, “[t]his is just a different type of opportunity, and honestly, if it wasn’t for the advent of the iPhone and the advent of the App Store and the SDK, I would probably still be at Electronic Arts focusing on making Blueprint as successful as it could possibly be.” Young goes on to explain that he was attracted by the iPhone’s usage patterns, in that more than half the time the average iPhone is in use it isn’t being used for telephony, calling the pattern “a fundamental shift.”

He also lauded the iPhone’s capabilities, saying, “The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.” Young also said that while his company will be involved in first-party development of games, it also plans to work with other developers, supplying funding, technological expertise, and marketing opportunities.