Cheyenne Mountain's Ybarra Reveals Second MMO, Expansion

Author: by Staff

Talking as part of an in-depth new Gamasutra interview, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment's Joe Ybarra has revealed that the Stargate Worlds developer has a total of four teams at work, including a second MMO currently in development. In Ybarra's long career, he has produced games including The Bard’s Tale, M.U.L.E., Starflight and Wasteland and MMOs including Shadowbane and The Matrix Online, and the SVP of strategic operations explained the history of Cheyenne Mountain as follows: "We started the company in July of 2005, and the company was basically started by a group of people that had a relationship with MGM, three years prior to 2005, for the rights to get the online versions of Stargate. And it took them about three years to find Gary Whiting, who is the chairman of our company, and our primary fund raiser. And so he thought, "Well, gee, this sounds like a really interesting idea, trying to do an MMO based on the science fiction TV show." So I was recruited and brought on as employee number one, the start of the start of the whole studio process. And over the course of the next year, year and a half, we built up the first studio, which is Stargate Worlds Studio, and then -- as I mentioned -- about a year and a half later, we started up studio number two, which was at the time headed -- and still is, actually -- by Rod Nakamoto, who's our VP of product development. So, now we're a year and a half in the process, so over the next year, we proceeded to build two more studios. So we have four now, one of which is located in Boston." When asked in more detail about what these studios - some of which are in the same physical location and include Handcranked Games and Superstition Studios - are working on, Ybarra explained: "Stargate, as an MMO, is the only large scale MMO that we are working on. We have another MMO that's under construction that's considerably less in scope, but nonetheless is still in that space. But, another answer to your question is that all of our products will have online as their primary mechanism for delivery. And, in that regard, we don't focus entirely on MMOs. In fact, our second product is a completely different kind of a product. It's more of a peer-to-peer kind of an online activity. It's possible, like Stargate, that we can put it on console as well. But our primary focus is on the PC, and delivering online game experiences. All four of our studios build products in that space." The full interview with Cheyenne's Ybarra is now available on Gamasutra, including more detail on the company's philosophy towards development and its plans for the future.