J.J. Abrams' film studio Bad Robot is getting a helping hand from former Valve executive Michael Booth, who will lead Bad Robot Games through its first development cycle. Booth will serve as creative director for the fledgling studio as it makes its official leap into video game development after the gaming division was founded in 2018.
Booth brings in a pretty impressive resume from his tenure with Valve, and again as the founder of Turtle Rock Studios, including as the lead creator of the Left 4 Dead series, Team Fortress 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, and a few iterations of Counter-Strike. His resume also includes his tenure at Blizzard, Electronic Arts on Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Nox, and most recently, as social VR director at Facebook. Meanwhile, J.J. Abrams had his own reputation in the world of cinema as the the director behind Star Trek, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, and the Cloverfield film series. He originally founded Bad Robot in 2001 with a focus on film and television production, until it partnered with media giants Tencent and Warner Bros. Interactive to expand into video games, founding its gaming division solely to produce PC, mobile, and console titles.
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Booth will be working alongside recently appointed CEO Anna Sweet, who came onto the team in July of this year. The goal, according to Sweet, is to focus on cross-medium worldbuilding in order to create games in step with Abrams' television and film projects, a more innovative approach than the traditional game-based-on-film model. Artists, musicians, and writers will be working in both divisions to further this particular aim towards cohesive storytelling between film and television, and video games. Booth elaborated on this further in a statement to THR:
"The games I create center around people working together to survive and thrive in fantastic worlds, which seems an excellent fit for JJ Abrams' approach to moviemaking. As a huge fan of JJ's work, I'm incredibly excited by the unique opportunity to create something new at Bad Robot Games Studios in collaboration with the world-class talent at Bad Robot."
Exactly what Booth will be bringing to the table for Bad Robots is otherwise unknown. The studio seems keen to take a leaf out of Striking Distance Studios' book and keep its first official project under wraps. So far, it's seminal work is described only as a "AAA title for PC/console that is designed to immerse both players and streaming audiences into a co-op, cinematic experience." That amorphous explanation sounds a lot like what Glen Schofield said, so vague is apparently still in vogue.
But unlike Schofield and Striking Distance Studios, Booth and Bad Robot have some seriously powerful backing at their disposal, so hopefully whatever they have in mind won't take quite so long as The Callisto Protocol to be revealed. And if the game is being created in tandem with the next JJ Abrams flick, the wait may prove to be all the more worth it.
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Source: THR
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