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Zynga's chief game designer resigns, wants to work with smaller team
by John Keefer, Jan 30, 2013 4:45pm PSTThe talent loss at struggling social game company Zynga continues as the company's chief game designer Brian Reynolds has resigned, saying he is looking to get back into the nitty gritty of game design.
Reynolds, who led the design for FrontierVille and headed up Zynga's Baltimore studio, confirmed in a Facebook post that he wanted to work with a small team again and get back to "hands-on" game design. He said his almost four years at Zynga was "exciting to be there at a time when new rules being written for a new industry." He didn't go into any detail but promised in a tweet that he would be "back soon."
Zynga acknowledged the departure in a statement (via Polygon): "We appreciate Brian's contribution and we're proud of the deep bench of creative leaders who are leading the next wave of game innovation at Zynga," said Steve Chiang, Zynga's president of games.
Reynolds joined Zynga after he left developer Big Huge Games in 2009 when it was acquired by 38 Studios. Prior to that, he had worked on such RTS classics as Rise of Nations, and Civilization 2 and Alpha Centauri while at Firaxis.
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The talent loss at struggling social game company Zynga continues as the company's chief game designer Brian Reynolds, who led the design for Frontierville, has resigned and is looking to get back into the nitty gritty of game design.
The talent loss at struggling social game company Zynga continues as the company's chief game designer Brian Reynolds, who led the design for Frontierville, has resigned and is looking to get back into the nitty gritty of game design. : Shacknews
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Reynolds: Actually you know, some of the best games ever made, I’ve felt like were actually, the best way to put it -- the most favorable way to put it -- might be a "glorious synthesis" of stuff in previous games. I bought the very first Civilization, I think one of the greatest games really of all time. I felt like, "Hey wow, what a great synthesis between the Empire game from the PC and the Civilization board game, you know? So it was like some of this and some of that, and then some completely new stuff thrown in.
Graft: Well, that’s the thing, though. With that example in particular, you've got "some of this" and you've got "some of that" and it’s got some new stuff thrown in. The games in question are games that are being accused of taking too much, and not adding enough. Like Dream Heights -- it’s being accused of not taking anything from anywhere else, that it’s not taking a little bit from there or a little bit from here or adding new stuff. A lot of people are seeing, "Hey, this is a reskinned Tiny Tower," and I think that’s the difference, though, between the example you gave and what’s happening now.
[PR steered the conversation away from Dream Heights at this point.]
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