VentureBeat

Mobile and web content producer Booyah announced today that it received $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins. The two seem like a good match, considering the company’s job listings for iPhone engineers and the investor’s special iPhone developers fund.

The Silicon Valley-based startup remains in stealth mode, and KP is its only named backer so far. Still, there are reasons to believe they might come out with something special. Its founders — Sam Christiansen, Keith Lee and Brian Morrisoe — previously worked at Blizzard Entertainment, home of the World of Warcraft games, as well as Activision and Insomniac Games. Between them, the latter two are responsible for gems like Call of Duty, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Resistance and Ratchet & Clank.

If that doesn’t prime expectations, at least the founders have high hopes for themselves. Their stated goal? To “blow people away with a product that actually improves their life while simultaneously delighting them.” And if that wasn’t enough — “Do good, to help other people do good, to change the world.”

As promised, I’ve followed up on my most anticipated games of E3 with an actual list of the top ten games of the show. I spent four days checking out games and interviewing executives at the Los Angeles media and game business summit. Clearly, I didn’t see everything. I didn’t even get to some of the games on the previous list. These games reflect my own tastes. I didn’t hold myself to any rules, like limiting the list to games that are coming out this year or ones that were actually playable. It’s just a list of what I can’t wait to play myself.

Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) Microsoft/Epic Games, Nov. 2008. If video games got Oscars, this one would win for best art direction. While the first game was dark and gloomy in its depiction of a world of destroyed beauty, this sequel has brilliant colors and sharper lines. The original Gears title sold 4.7 million units worldwide, even though I thought it had a steep learning curve. But the more I played it, the more fun it was. Flamethrowers, big bosses, and swarms of enemies make this one more exciting and challenging. There is nothing as visceral as using a chainsaw bayonet to slice your enemy in half. And of all of the games that I played or viewed at E3, I stuck with this one the longest.

Wii Music (Nintendo Wii) Nintendo, fall 2008. Shigeru Miyamoto sure took his time with this game, which he first showed off to an audience in 2006. I was able to sit down with this game, which allows you hold the Wii controller and its companion Nunchuk to play the “air guitar.” I strummed a violin by going through the motions. I pounded on steel drums. This game has almost no learning curve, making it accessible to young kids and adults who have no rhythm and no idea how to play an instrument. In that way, it could promote freestyle play and be far more appealing for younger gamers than either the “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero” series of music games.

Left 4 Dead (PC, Xbox 360) Electronic Arts/Valve, November, 2008. This game is set in a world where a pandemic turns everyone into a zombie. As a survivor, you are trapped in a city and must escape with a group of survivors. I played just a single round of co-op online play of this game with three other players. It was awesome. You have to work closely with the other players to take out the zombies. If you don’t synchronize your efforts, you’re bound to run out of ammo at the same time. The zombies are fast and so you can’t all pump lead into the same lead attacker or you’ll fall victim to the next ones. It makes for frenetic game play and a lot of repeatable fun as you await “Resident Evil 5,” the big Capcom zombie-killing game which was postponed until the spring of 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

Ted Price is one of the stalwarts of video game development. He founded Insomniac Games as an independent video game development studio in 1994. Since then, the company has sold more than 28.5 million video games. The president and chief executive of Burbank, Calif.-based Insomniac is perhaps the biggest die-hard PlayStation developer outside of Sony. Even as many other studios go cross-platform, Price’s studio has made games exclusively for the PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. Its big hits include “Spyro the Dragon,” “Ratchet & Clank,” and “Resistance: Fall of Man.” The latter was a key launch title that got the PS 3 off the ground in the fall of 2006 and squared off against Microsoft’s big title,”Gears of War” for the Xbox 360. Price also served the industry as chairman of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which gives out the equivalent of the Oscars of the game industry. The company recently decided to open its first satellite studio in Raleigh, N.C. and is working on Resistance 2 for release this fall. Opening that studio is no light matter, since the company cares about its small-company culture and has been named three years running as one of the “Best Small Companies to Work for in America” by the Society for Human Resources Management and the Great Places to Work Institute.

VB: Why did you set up your new office in Raleigh, N.C.?

TP: When it comes to location, North Carolina has a thriving game development community in the Research Triangle. It has the colleges with strong computer science and art programs from which we’d like to draw. There’s a lot of talent on the East Coast that would like to work for Insomniac but doesn’t want to make the move to California. This is an opportunity for us to be available for talent.

There is [game developer] Epic [already in the region], Ubisoft’s Red Storm (Tom Clancy) studio and there are others. It’s a thriving game community that is very supportive of other companies.

VB: How is this consistent with the overall strategy of where you want to take Insomniac?

TP: We’ve always had the philosophy of quality over quantity. We’ve also had the problem of pressure to expand. As our production processes become more efficient, we have more opportunity. But we want to keep the Burbank office small and focus on just a few games at once. By starting in North Carolina, we can create more games, more intellectual property, but continue that small company feel in both places.

VB: Is game development changing and causing this expansion?

TP: That’s not the pressure we’re under. It’s self-imposed pressure. It’s opportunity for all of us. We love making games. We love to come up with new concepts, but because we want to remain relatively small, we can’t do the things we want to do.

VB: You’ve been interested in the past in different kinds of business model opportunities for game developers. I think what used to happen was that game developers became publishers.

TP: Perhaps. I don’t know too many who successfully made the jump from making games to publishing games. It’s different skills. We focus on what we do best, which is developing games.

VB: But I suppose there should be a way to become a bigger company and still focus on just the part about developing games? Foundation 9 or Bioware/Pandemic forged that path to become stand-alone development companies. Do some of those alternatives looking interesting to you?

TP: What’s most attractive to all of us is to maintain the core philosophies we’ve had from day one. To create a company where people are creatively free, where there is a lot of communication, where politics and bureaucracy don’t get in the way, and where the games are key. That’s why we’re moving in this particular direction. Read the rest of this entry »