EA Shuts Down Blueprint Division; Boom Blox 2 in Development

Nov 19, 2008

With the latest round of layoffs, EA has killed its mysterious, always undercover Blueprint division.

A former employee who worked on Blueprint confirmed to Variety that all the corporate employees who worked on the project have either quit, been laid off, or moved onto other projects.

Talking to this ex-employee, I also got a much better sense of what exactly Blueprint was up to. Some people called it a project, some a division, others just a collection of games, but whatever it was, EA never officially announced it. In fact, when I contacted EA to comment, corporate communication VP Jeff Brown declined on the grounds that the company has never acknowledged Blueprint's existence. (Not quite true, since PR person Tammy Schachter discussed it in this interview, but anyway...)

As Neil Young, who started Blueprint mid-2007 and led it for around a year before leaving this spring to head an iPhone gaming company, told me at GDC, Blueprint was intended to be a new way to develop fresh properties across multiple media. In fact, it was originally called Transmedia internally before adopting the name Blueprint.

In addition to its charter to work on new stuff, Blueprint also got ownership of several existing projects at EA, most notably the three games being developed by Steven Spielberg, which makes sense since Neil Young spearheaded that deal. ("Spore" was also under the Blueprint aegis for a short while) It was part of the EA Games label, with Young reporting to label president Frank Gibeau.

It seems there were around a dozen people working on Blueprint and their mission was to change the development process so that individuals or small teams could work together from disparate locations without necessarily being employed at an EA studio. "Using distributed people and leveraging technology in a significant way would allow us to break the high-priced model of game development where everybody is on sight, hired as a full-time regular employee," the former Blueprint staffer told me.

One of the few projects EA Blueprint was able to get going in its short existence was a deal with Armature, an Austin studio formed by several former Retro Studios employees (lots of details in this Gamasutra piece). EA took a minority investment in Armature, signed a first look deal, and also built an off-site location where all game development assets could be stored, but the developers would have near instantaneous access via the Net. The idea is that this would let Armature work at its own offices, outside an EA studio, but still let the publisher own the assets for games they did together.

Boom_blox_western2_1 The Blueprint model is also being used on a previously undisclosed, but none-too-surprising, project: "Boom Blox 2." (not the official title) Apparently work is already underway on a sequel to the spring's innovative Wii puzzle game, which got very good reviews (especially from me) and and sold decently, last we heard. But whie development is being led out of EALA, where the first "Boom Blox" was made, people are working on it together from all over the world. "Everybody is integrated, regardless of whether they're in the same physical location," explained the ex-Blueprinter. "It's truly the spirit of what Blueprint was going to be."

Because it was a start-up unit, Blueprint required lots of investment from EA for the technology it needed to make distributed development work. Apparently it couldn't get alot of those resources, which is one of the reasons it didn't do a lot beyond the Armature deal and "Boom Blox 2" (now part of EA's merged casual/Sims label). After Young left this fall and Louis Castle took over Blueprint, I'm told, more staffers departed and the unit lost further momentum. With the most recent round of layoffs, the last employees working for Blueprint were let go and Castle segued to a new role at EALA. The division was never officially killed. Its games are still ongoing. But with nobody working for Blueprint anymore, it simply doesn't exist.

Source: Varitey