The games you're going to be able to play from super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer will be original and tell great stories, according to the new men running Jerry Bruckheimer Games.
The grand collaboration between Pirates of the Caribbean and CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Rock Band creator MTV Games announced in December 2007 took another step forward with the announcement today that Bruckheimer Games will be led by two gaming industry veterans.
Jim Veevaert, a Microsoft veteran who served as executive producer of Halo 3 and worked with marquee studios Bungie, Epic and Rare during his tenure at the company will be Bruckheimer's president of production. Jay Cohen, former senior vice president of publishing at Ubisoft, is credited with helping shepherd the Tom Clancy franchises as well as Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed. He will be Bruckheimer's director of development.
The two execs will enable the new company to "create content that challenges the way things are done and the experiences gamers have today," Bruckheimer said in a press release announcing the hires.
Kotaku interviewed both Veevaert and Cohen on Monday to find out what their signings mean for gamers.
Neither is ready to be explicit about the games the company is making nor to commit to when gamers might play the first one. But they did offer some insight into their team's philosophy:
"We're going to create games that tell great stories," Veevaert said. "It's not about naming a genre or a platform that we're making games for. It's creating that impact."
Cohen said Bruckheimer Games will run a tight ship, suggesting an intimacy of development one might not expect given the scale of the parties involved. "It's not about putting 100 titles or 50 titles… in development at the same time," he said. "Let's put a smaller number of them and think about them in the fashion that hasn't really been done before."
Bruckheimer Games will create original games that might then be turned into film or TV projects, the new executives explained. Cohen said this represented an evolution from an old mentality that viewed games as little more than the equal to the official coffee mug for a movie. Instead, he painted the mental picture of Bruckheimer's top film and TV people collaborating with the new gaming team to bring the best of all disciplines together to improve each other's chosen form of entertainment. "This is a continued progression of what is a necessary education experience for all in order to advance the entertainment experience."
Both men officially started at the company earlier this year. Veevaert is based in Seattle, Cohen in San Francisco. The Jerry Bruckheimer Games headquarters will be in the same location as its TV and film counterparts, in Santa Monica.