Irrational's co-founder on the future of immersive sims
By Alec Meer on August 10th, 2011.
Curse our limited-length titles! For this post should really be called something like ‘Irrational co-founder and now Blue Manchu boss Jon Chey talks more about his splendid-sounding new PC boardgame/ CCG/ MMO mash-up Card Hunter, how to make free-to-play non-horrible, what he thinks the future might be for immersive sims in the vein of System Shock and his thoughts on his former studio’s controversial XCOM remake’. Doesn’t bloomin’ fit though, does it? Oh well. You’ll find all that stuff out for yourself simply by reading on: tons of interesting comments in here, and I’m particularly excited by the thought towards the end that a coming wave of mid-budget simulational shooters might be on the cards, and far more likely to take big creative risks than their glossier triple-A peers… (Oh, and if you missed the more Card Hunter-centric first part of this interview, looky here).
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BioShock, Blue Manchu, Card Hunter, feature, interview, System-Shock, X-COM: UFO Defense, xcom.
Irrational co-founder rationalises PC CCG
By Alec Meer on August 2nd, 2011.
Card Hunter, the lovely-looking PC-based CCG/boardgame/MMO hybrid from Irrational co-founder (and former Looking Glass man) John Chey’s new studio Blue Manchu Games, looks right up RPS’ street. So, I had a chat to him about the game’s inspirations, its conceptual similarity to Mojang’s Scrolls, why it might be first time a collectible card game manages to be successfully singleplayer, and why it’s an idealised version of the RPGs we played as children.
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Blue Manchu, Card Hunter, feature, interview, Jon Chey.
By Alec Meer on July 20th, 2011.
The danger of a phrase like ‘Irrational Co-Founder’ is a bunch of people will probably presume you’re talking about Ken Levine. So let’s get that clear up-front: this is not a post about Ken Levine. This is a post about another founder member of System Shock 2/BioShock developers Irrational. Jon Chey has been with the studio since the very start, and prior to that did a stint at god-factory Looking Glass – so he’s someone you should take an interest in. Lately, he’s been heading up the former Aussie wing of Irrational, rebranded as 2K Australia and which did a bunch of the work on BioShock 2 and the upcoming XCOM (I know, I know) – but now he’s going it alone as an indie dev named Blu Manchu. The first project puts board games, card games, browser games, RPGs and strategy games into a blender, so he’s not exactly starting off small.
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Blu Manchu, Card Hunter, Irrational.
