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Industry veterans David Wessman, Jack Mamais and Coray Seifert have come together to form Impeller Studios, a new independent outfit focused on developing VR titles.
Wessman is known for developing the X-Wing series, as well as deigning Saints Row. Mamais has experience working on titles such as Crysis and Far Cry, while Seifert has writing and design credits for Homefront, Frontlines: Fuel of War and other AAA titles.
Speaking with Games Industry, Seifert talked about Impeller’s interest in VR – suggesting that the studio has been founded in effort to keep up with the times.
"I’m not the first person to say this, but I think VR is not only the future of games. It’s the future of all computing," Seifert said. "Monitors are going to be those quaint things that my kids are going to tease me about… It’s not only going to be a profound games industry thing. It’s going to be a profound computing thing.”
For us, we absolutely want to be a part of it because we’re not just trying to form a game company because we want a job and we can make money doing it. We’re obsessed with new, cool things and new, cool experiences and what VR is going to afford game experiences in the future is profound.
"Right now… we’re all doing it nights, weekends, stealing time as we can get it. We’re all self funding it. As we need to invest in it, we’re investing in it ourselves because we believe in the team. We believe in the core concept. And we know long term it’s going to be worth it.
"I think once you get your prototype together, once people can see that it’s real, that’s when you hit the inflection point of either a publisher gets involved and helps you out with the rest of it, an investor comes in, maybe you do crowd funding, maybe you do Early Access, but once you get to that prototype phase, that’s when it’s real. I think we’re going to hit our launch point very quickly.”
Impeller’s website boasts that the studio is using Steam VR tech to develop its current project – reportedly a title that falls into the space genre.
