Star Wars Chap J.J. Abrams & ChAIR Are Up To Spyjinx
Espionage antics
Your man J.J. Abrams, him behind the new Star Wars and Star Trek and Star Lost and Star Alias, is sauntering into video games with a game not about Stars at all. He and his production company Bad Robot are working with Infinity Blade and Shadow Complex devs ChAIR on Spyjinx [official site], a game clearly about espionage. They're a bit vague about what else it is, and are showing nothing of it right now, but I'm up for spy antics from this pairing.
ChAIR's Donald Mustard (left) and Abrams (right) explain the sum of what we know in this here video:
"Spyjinx is a unique blend between an action-strategy game mixed with really dynamic world-building with a healthy dose of RPG character development," says Mustard. Abrams, meanwhile, says "it really will need to be experienced and then it will be defined by what it is as opposed to necessarily saying 'It's just like that one!' or 'it's exactly like that!' It's not quite like anything."
It's a video game, then. From the rest of their chat and the few details and filenames on their site, I'll broadly guess it'll throw you a bunch of tools to tackle problems as you see fit, allowing for creative and emergent solutions to spy-problems. I'm guessing.
Spyjinx is coming in 2016 to pocket telephones as well as PC, but that shouldn't be too off-putting; ChAIR's Infinity Blade lives on pocks and is still an all-fighting, all-shining Unreal Engine affair. A beta's coming, for which you can sign up over here.
[Editor's footnote: Spyjinx is officially stylised SPYJINX, but that's ridiculous and I won't allow that. How come I'll use the '90s AOL capitalisation of ChAIR? Because the world should see what they've done, and should know their shame.]