Giant Squid partially owned by film production company
Giant Squid, a new studio set up by former thatgamecompany art director Matt Nava, has an interesting relationship with Hollywood.
Speaking with GameInformer, Nava discussed Giant Squid's relationship with The Ink Factory, a new production company based in Los Angeles and the UK, which makes movies and is helping to fund the games studio. Fava said The Ink Factory is "obsessed with storytelling, narrative, and creating a kind of thoughtful movie experience for people" and that the collaboration creates an overlap of creative types from different industries.
"Right now what happens is they are co-owners of the Giant Squid company, and so what they’re really interested in doing is becoming kind of a trans media company where they are putting out creative content on all sorts of platforms," Nava explained.
"They are really interested in getting into the gaming space. and so Giant Squid Studio is kind of a way for them to understand that space. For me it’s a place where I have complete freedom to do the kind of games that I envision, and they are there to support and help make that happen."
If you're wondering how "freedom" lines up with "transmedia" - which often means licensed games - put your mind at rest. Giant Squid won't be pumping out cheap movie tie-ins.
"They have a lot of very interesting IP that they might want to try making into games. When I first talked to them about it I said, 'You know, I think that really what I want to do with my kind of studio is to create our own IP,' and so they said, 'Yeah, that’s what we want. We don’t want to be forcing IPs down your throat,'" Fava explained.
"It’s kind of like a first-look basis. If we make a cool IP and they want to make a movie out of that IP, they have the first choice to do that before we go to other people. Things like that, and we have the same thing for IP that they have for games, but there’s no kind of thing where either company is forced to make a movie out of a game or something like that, because it could be a complete disaster and that’s not what we want to do.
"We want to make things that are really super great, but really allow this kind of cross pathway between the companies for potential projects. We really don’t know what that could be, but games are evolving and movies are evolving, and who knows what the intersection may be in the future. That’s what we’re interested in."
The Ink Factory's first movie is Most Wanted Man, with Philip Seymour Hoffman. That's probably not what Giant Squid is working on.
"We’ve got a game concept and we’ve been developing it for a few months, and the whole future of next-gen consoles is about to become much more clear," Fava noted.
"That’s kind of what we are targeting, PC and the next-gen consoles possibly. It’s all up in the air right now, but hopefully we will be able to deliver the product to as wide range of people as we possibly can. That’s our goal."
Giant Squid does not expect to announce its initial projects for some time yet.