Staff from studios such as Lockwood Publishing, Funcom, and Bohemia Interactive have formed a new game developer, Red Rover Interactive.
Based in Oslo, Norway and Newcastle, UK, the new studio was formed back in February and has locked in $5 million in total seed funding from various investors. Among those names is Behold Ventures, a Nordic firm headed up by a pair of ex-DICE staffers, former general manager Karl Troedsson and executive producer Sigurlina Ingvarsdottir.
Leading Red Rover are CEO Fred Richardson and COO Joe Stevens. Both men previously worked at Ubisoft Reflections, and respectively at Funcom (Conan Exiles) and Lockwood Publishing (Avakin Life).
Other co-founders include design director Marek Zilay (of Bohemia Interactive fame), technical director Daniel Ratzer (Funcom), and art director Sebastian Zimmerman (Crytek). According to the press release, there are currently around 20 employees.
Red Rover puts its eggs in the multiplayer basket
The studio’s first project is a multiplayer-focused title said to “catapult the survival genre in a new direction.” Long-term, Red Rover aims to “create the most novel and engaging multiplayer experiences on the market.”
Several of its founders have experience with multiplayer survival games. Funcom has developed various multiplayer titles based on the Conan and Dune franchises, and Bohemia Interactive created the Arma series and the survival game DayZ, which was based off an old Arma 2 mod.
“We believe multiplayer interactions are fundamentally more powerful than PVE ones,” said Richardson. With the collective experience shared by its staff, Richardson hopes the studio will build something that takes the genre “in a genuinely new direction.”