Brian Reynolds recently left his post as chief game designer at Zynga. He wrote this exclusively for GamesBeat.

Just under four years ago, I took a flier on a very young company called Zynga. My old studio had just been sold out from under me – an epic tale in its own right, but anyway it happened – and the strategy genres that I’d worked in for most of my career had fallen on grim times. I thought perhaps I was all washed up as a game designer and started looking around for something “quiet” for what I figured would be the “fading away” down slope of my career.

But boy, was I fascinated by Facebook, which was still very new to us non-Millennials, and, among other things, I found myself playing a Zynga word game with Bing Gordon (the former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts and current partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), who a decade prior had produced so many great ideas for Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri that we’d given him a design credit. “Hey, you should come on out. I know this guy. I’m on the board” goes my vague recollection of the conversations. And that’s how, in March 2009, I got introduced to Mark Pincus.

Serendipitously, Mark listed Rise of Nations (created by my studio Big Huge Games) as his favorite game. We hit it off. The prototype-and-iterate method of game design I’d learned from Sid Meier seemed like it might fit with the completely new watch-metrics-and-tune methods that Zynga had been perfecting (Mark told me Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball, about the use of analytics in managing the Oakland A’s baseball team was required reading). It also dawned on me that a whole new area of the industry was taking off and there weren’t many experienced game designers doing it yet.  So I signed on, and what a wild and great ride it’s been!

In the early days I’d hear a lot of traditional developers saying things like Zynga games “weren’t even games,” but my own experiences playing them made it very clear they were. At Zynga we were making games for the true mass market, and it seemed pretty obvious to me that games for the mass market would be quite different than games for the hardcore gamer. Nobody would confuse a summer blockbuster with an art film or period piece, either, nor a best-selling novel with Moby Dick – and yet there are a lot of people out there who crave that kind of entertainment. And the challenge of creating game experiences with “perfectly rounded edges” – smooth and friendly for the masses – has been one of the most interesting challenges of my career.

I think my favorite part, throughout the whole Zynga experience, has been the sense that we were writing new rules for a new industry. It felt strange, but awesome, to make an arbitrary decision in April and then by August see the entire social games industry doing exactly that same thing. And the social games space was so young (and initially a bit primitive). It moved so fast that being a game designer in it felt like traveling back to the late ’80s “knowing everything you know now” and then recapitulating the ’90s and ’00s at hyperspeed.

Fortunately, the capability to absorb and adapt to change quickly is one of the great strengths of Zynga’s culture – the true meaning of the motto and occasional battle cry “Zynga Speed!” Time and time again, I’ve seen Zynga teams pull together and surprise everyone with their nimbleness and productivity.

Mark also has a talent for surrounding himself with the best and the brightest, and the chance to work with so many industry luminaries – so many of whom used to be my direct competitors – really took my game up a notch or two. I especially looked forward to our annual game design summits, which featured an incredible collection of talent the likes of which I’d never seen pulling the same oar before. It was fun to watch the transformation as the Command & Conquer Generals guy (Mark Skaggs) became the FarmVille guy, the Age of Empires guys become the Words With Friends and CastleVille guys, the guy I remembered from Infocom games helping plan FrontierVille’s story, and so on. The same thing goes on in the engineering group, the analytics group, and so many other places – Zynga is very good at hiring the best, and one of my greatest regrets at leaving Zynga is missing out on all that talent and creativity.

But after almost four years (and longer than I was ever at Firaxis, if you can believe it!), I’m ready to shift into a different gear. I miss getting to write code personally and make fun “with my own hands.” And suddenly, the tablet and mobile world look like they might be on the verge of a strategy games renaissance – hey, I used to be good at making those! – and free-to-play is leading the way. Not that Zynga isn’t willing and even eager to have me do that, but I even miss, in a funny way, the day to day panics of being somewhere small and new and vulnerable, and the excitement of owning a small company. I want to experiment more than might be appropriate for a publicly traded company, and I might want to do something that would be “off strategy” for Zynga or otherwise too risky.

So I’m getting that itch, and though I need some time to think about exactly what I want to do next. I suspect that “starting a little studio with a few wingmen” — for the fourth time in my career — is likely to be on the menu.

So thank you, Zynga, for taking me on when my genre was disappearing. Thank you for showing me that there’s still a lot for game designers to do and we still need to be training the next Sid Meier, Will Wright, Gabe Newell, etc. Thank you for pretty much inventing game analytics and giving us an amazing new tool to apply real data and statistics to answer questions for which we could previously rely only on our gut. Thank you for the chance to work in social media and really master the free-to-play model. Thank you for unlocking a true mass market audience to game designers for the very first time ever – for letting me make games that more people played in a single day than had played all the games I’d made in the last 20 years combined. Thank you for Zynga Speed and the amazing teams I got to work with. Can’t wait to see what you do next – see you round the industry.

Brian Reynolds was until very recently the chief game designer at Zynga, where he headed the Zynga East studio in Baltimore and worked on titles like FrontierVille and CityVille 2 and advised all of the game teams. He also founded Big Huge Games and created titles such as Rise of Nations. He cofounded Firaxis Games with Sid Meier and worked with him both there and at MicroProse, creating games such as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Civilization II.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Today, developer Epic Games announced its newest division, Impossible Studios, which is comprised of former employees of Big Huge Games.

Many employees from the now defunct studio found themselves without jobs when parent company 38 Studios experienced significant financial troubles early this year. A skipped loan payment and missed payroll led to layoffs at the developer, which declared bankruptcy and closed down in June.

Now Impossible Studios — which houses 36 employees in its office in Hunt Valley, Md., Epic told GamesBeat in an email — has welcomed those previously working under Big Huge Games’ roof.

Sean Dunn, who was the studio general manager at Big Huge Games, leads the studio as director and will oversee its first project: the touch-based action-role-playing game Infinity Blade: Dungeons for iOS. Impossible is developing the title in collaboration with Epic’s studio in Cary, N.C., and the Utah-based Chair Entertainment.

“Epic Games has truly embraced this stellar collection of developers who were displaced by the closing of Big Huge Games,” said Dunn. “They have looked after us with complete care, giving us all the tools and resources we need to make a lot of gamers happy.”

The past employees of Big Huge Games worked on releases such as the Rise of Nations titles for PC and Mac, Catan for Xbox Live Arcade, Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties for PC, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

“We were so glad we could help keep this great team together, and we’re lucky to have them,” said Epic Games president Dr. Michael Capps, who will lead a panel about Infinity Blade: Dungeons with its lead designer, Ian Frazier, and author Brandon Sanderson at Dragon*Con on August 31. “At the time, I said that finding a full team of superstars was ‘impossible,’ and apparently the name stuck! Pairing the imagination and experience of Impossible with Epic’s technology, IP [intellectual properties], and resources makes for a business greater than the sum of its parts.”

Infinity Blade: Dungeons is set to release in the App Store later this year.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Mark Pincus is the newest billionaire in Silicon Valley, thanks to the December initial public offering of Zynga, the social game giant he founded in 2007.

For much of last year, Zynga was in a quiet period leading up to its IPO and Pincus had to wear a muzzle. During that time, Zynga haters came out of the woodwork in poorly disguised attempts to derail the IPO.

But the company managed to go public at an $8.9 billion valuation and raise $1 billion for its acquisition war chest. And now the muzzle is off. Pincus is now free to respond to allegations that his company is an untalented copycat — an issue that won’t go away — and that its business is overly dependent on Facebook.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Pincus. And if you want more, check out our 25,000-word history of Zynga.

Gamesbeat: So I guess you were a millionaire last time I talked to you. Now you have a “B” in front of it.

Mark Pincus: Well … I think that the rest of the world has more fun and intrigue with all of it than I do, or any of us.

GB: Do you think you get too much attention for (being a billionaire)?

MP: I don’t think that this has been about that. I’ve been interviewed by someone on NBC who said, “Isn’t that what all you Silicon Valley people are about? Just trying to have more money or whatever?” And I said, “No, that’s really not what we’re about here. We’re way more ambitious than that. We want to change the world, make history.”

GB: How do you get them to come to understand that part?

MP: I just saw the movie “Moneyball” yesterday, and I realized, everyone doesn’t have to understand you, or believe in what you’re doing, while you’re doing it. Sometimes it’s later, when people see the outcomes of what you’re doing, that they maybe change their beliefs.

GB: It was quite a while that you were in this quiet period. Do you have a lot to get off your chest now that you’re able to talk more? What are some things that you’re itching to address?

MP: If you go back to before the quiet period and look at what I was publicly talking about, that’s the thread we’ve still been on. We’re not just trying to build a company, we’re not just trying to build an industry, we’re trying to build a movement around play. We want people to put play in their day. We want to remind people to play with people and connect with people in their lives, and people are doing that. And I think we as an industry — and it’s now a broader industry — our industry goes all the way from fairly hardcore gaming developers to social developers.

If you go back to what I said when I keynoted the Social Gaming Summit industry conference at UCSF, I talked about how we need to work as an industry to build an awesome experience that convinces people that this can be the next great free medium since TV. I think we’re in the middle of this massive secular movement to free-to-play gaming. That’s been going on for a while, but I think it’s really accelerated. With mobile and social, it’s started to really penetrate the mass market.

What we’re excited about is seeing how huge numbers of people are changing their behaviors, like hearing last year that social games had replaced soap operas. We’re seeing it cut across the culture, seeing Words With Friends now become a cultural meme. And not just for the success of that one game, but for the success of our industry. Because on the back of Words With Friends rides an entire industry.

GB: This idea of changing play goes back pretty far in Zynga’s history. I don’t know if it was there at the very beginning, or how early you adopted it. It is interesting to me that none of the traditional game companies thought in such an ambitious way about getting everyone to play. Why do you think that was?

MP: When I first walked into EA — it was the meeting where I met Bing [Gordon, now a member of Zynga's board] — I said to the room full of EA people I thought social gaming was the best thing that had ever happened to them. I said that I thought it would create a whole new generation of online digital gamers, and I thought that whether or not companies like EA chose to play in that part of the market, these people would graduate to more hardcore, more sophisticated [games]. That TV might get you into video, and then you might want to go to movies. I don’t believe that TV cannibalized movies, and I don’t believe social gaming was going to cannibalize the video game industry. I think it was a renewed chance for growth.

GB: And it was about the same time that the Wii was starting to really take off?

MP: Yeah! I thought the Wii was a real shot across the bow. It was orthogonal. All of a sudden it, it wasn’t that it had the fastest processor and could do the coolest new graphics. It was an innovation in accessibility, which led to more social. So why didn’t the traditional industry go after this opportunity?

First of all, they did. I’ll remind you that the EAs of the world had games on Facebook almost when we did. If you remember, the whole Scrabulous thing was EA, (in a legal fight over) the Scrabble rights. They did focus on and pursue it. I think what was different was that we came from a place that was more organic to the medium, and we believed that this was the whole thing.

I think that initially, for the traditional industry, this was seen as a channel to take existing intelletcual property to market. Which it could be, and is, and will be. But our approach was that you couldn’t have play, you couldn’t have social gaming, without social. And that it had to exist in places that people wanted to hang out and congregate, and not be a destination that required that much intent and pre-planned interest. We thought it had to be free. Similar to, I think, when Amazon innovated to get us to do e-commerce, they had to take down the barriers to commerce. They had to compete with offline commerce, they had to show you that it was fewer minutes and hopefully fewer dollars to shop online. To create a whole movement, a behavioral change, where people saw online as a convenience and not a hassle.

Similarly, we thought that we had to remove tons and tons of barriers that were stopping the mass market from playing. So free was one, but even beyond free it was the download, the complexity. And the areas that we’ve innovated sometimes are too small; they don’t come in big, explosive graphics packages. The innovations that we focus on are things like the FTUE, which stands for First Time User Experience. We counted how many clicks it took, how many seconds before you could understand what the game was and why you’d want to play it. We had to simplify what a game was to make it more accessible.

GB: There was an interesting reaction, where you guys did do a great favor for the game industry, and the industry reacted so negatively.

MP: Yeah. That’s why it was so interesting watching “Moneyball” yesterday. You have to see it, and the book is even better. The whole story of this guy, Billy Beane, what he did with the Oakland A’s; he challenged the whole way that baseball had been managed. He said he was just going to focus on metrics and outcomes. He was scorned, laughed at, almost fired, and it didn’t work out at first. Everyone said he was an idiot, until it totally did work out, they had a 20-game winning streak that broke all records in baseball. It changed the industry forever.

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