The former president and founder of Rockstar Leeds is returning to video games. Gordon Hall will lead the newly formed mobile studio The Blast Furnace, and he will also be the chief creative officer for all of Activision's mobile products.
Hall has worked on portable versions of Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition and the Grand Theft Auto Stories games for the PlayStation Portable. In a phone interview with industry gaming news website Gamsutra, Hall said he couldn't stay away from the industry.
"Literally, I couldn't keep my head out of games," Hall said. "I started doodling game designs, I was reading books on psychology, I was reading books on new economics, the economics of gifting...all of a sudden it became a passion, this whole mobile space. So while I was out there trying to chill out, I couldn't do it. I got yanked back in."
Activision originally opened its Leeds studio last November, and previously revealed the developer would be working on mobile and handheld Call of Duty games. In an interview with GameBeat, that mobile gaming can't a second-class experience for gamers.
"We have to make sure we're innovating," Hall said in the interview. "You will never catch us doing a port of a console game, which I think is a second-class experience for the user. Everything will be built from the ground up for mobile [devices] and tablets."
Now, with a unified strategy in place, Activision has an experienced mobile game designer in place and is ready to expand the company's interest in mobile gaming.
