Game culture: Jar of Sparks: New studio with experienced Halo developers

Honored US developers who worked on brands like Halo, Batman: Arkham and Doom are founding a new team in Seattle: Jar of Sparks belongs to the Chinese giant NetEase and has big plans.

Toshihiro “Mr. Yakuza” Nagoshi and Suda51 from Grasshopper Manufacture have shown the way – they have joined Chinese internet giant NetEase with their new and newly established teams and strengthen its growing family of studios. Incidentally, it was very similar at Striking Distance Studios, which belong to the Korean Krafton Group and are about to be released with their The Callisto Protocol. Here, too, studio founder Schofield took a risk, left Activision plus Call of Duty and founded a new US studio, which belongs to a larger Asian company. Also Jar of Sparks, whose name (engl.: vessel full of sparks) is almost poetic, expects a lot from it – in an interview with colleagues from IGN he talks about the partnership: “If you want to go ahead and be innovative, then your publisher, i.e. your financier, must be aware that you can sometimes slip. That was one of the main points I spoke to NetEase about: you have to be prepared to fall if you want to push new things. And if you’re by our side, you know the risks.”

A lot of experience

In addition to Hook, who was recently responsible for a very strong game as head of design for Halo Infinite, the founding team includes other experienced game makers: Paul Crocker, who was lead narrative director at Rocksteady and worked on the Batman Arkham trilogy, Greg Stone, producer of 2016’s Doom, as well as Steve Dyck, who was a former member of EA and later also contributed to the Halo series. And of course the team isn’t complete yet – the young studio’s LinkedIn page, for example, is looking for a Chief Technical Officer.

Hook is aware of the risks (“You’re building a whole team there, with people who don’t know each other and have never worked together on a game before.“) and therefore doesn’t want to do a live service title for now: “Live service games add another layer of complexity to development, and from my own experience the workload is pretty intense. And with the first game of Jar of Sparks, we don’t need that component – we want to focus the creative energy and not sap it through the constant pressure of a live service application.”

Hook, of course still talking to IGN, names games like V Rising or Valheim as positive examples of success even without a $300 million budget in the back. You don’t want to at the moment”emulate God of War, but create your own niche.“Jar of Sparks doesn’t have a game title, a specific genre or even concept art yet, although the team is certainly a few secret steps further than they are willing to show the public…