I was fortunate enough to get the time to have a chat with GTA co-creator Stewart Waterson about his new studio and their upcoming game Enjoy:
Not much is known about Rebel studios at the moment. Tell me about how it started for you?
Rebel Studios is my new company which I recently became a co-founder of. I joined the company at the start of the year (2022). The first day back Gavin Cunningham, my CEO, got in touch with me through some contacts I had in the AR (Augmented Reality) world, a Legendary Scottish Games guy called Graeme Devine & Andy Lanning, who was one of the writers and inkers on the Guardians of the Galaxy comics. They worked at a company called Magic Leap… So Magic Leap was an early AR technology start-up, valued at around $2bn based on investment from Google, Legendary Pictures etc. I visited and worked with a few developers over there, the core technology was phenomenal, and I decided I wanted to focus my efforts on AR.
That technology ended up going B2B as opposed to B2C. But some of the people I made contact with recommended me to Gavin. He dropped me a message and before I knew it, I was onboard at Rebel.
Source: Rebel Studios
So aside from that the guys started an NFT project with a comic book artist called Adam Pollina. Adam is one of the guys who’s worked on comics, games and on movie stuff. He’s actually one of the guys where I’ve admired his art from afar. From the PlayStation 2 times, he did art concept for NBA Street 2, Def Jam Wrestling, all these sorts of hip-hop sports merges like SSX Tricky and stuff. So, I thought I finally found the guy that I’ve always wanted to work with when I was working on GTA and State of Emergency and those sort of urban street styles, he’s one of the best in the game.
How did Rebel Studios get on your radar?
It was a cold call that came from nowhere. Something random popped up on LinkedIn, you know how that happens, it’s more like Facebook nowadays. From that we had a chat, I had previously been looking at NFTs. Because I have a number of pieces of original GTA art that I was looking at doing NFTs for last year. From that, someone phoned me from Rebel and said we are looking for a battle-ready game designer, would you be interested? It’s an area that is much maligned by the games industry (NFTs), but we did our launch in mid-2022, have done our carbon offset, and our green campaign and it’s now free of that. So, we will hopefully be looking to use our layer 2 options for anything game side.
Source: Rebel Studios
Going back to Rebel Studios, tell me about where you are now and about and your game EY3K0N?
I started in the games industry 30 years ago now, and there wasn’t an industry at the time, it was only just starting. I’ve always wanted to do mobile gaming, VR/AR, social games, casual games, I’ve always wanted to get in (to things) when it’s just starting. And that’s exactly the reason I’m in this space now.
EY3K0N has now been in development for 2 years and the team is made up of prestigeous talent from Grand Theft Auto, and former employees from Xbox Studios, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Nike. Rebel Studios has since become part of the ‘Lightship Managed Partner Program’ by Niantic, creators of world famous ‘Pokémon GO’, giving us dedicated developer support for EY3K0N augmented reality experiences.
We have recently launched NFTs into probably the worst market we could have launched them into (a bear market) but we have done really well. We have a 35k audience on Twitter, 14k on Discord or thereabouts.
Our game is called EY3K0N. It encapsulates The EY3K0N Anthology, a series of short stories set in the EY3K0N world, accessible to casual readers in the form of digital comics through EY3K0N.io. The game itself is a mobile alternate reality game, using augmented reality experiences via Niantic’s Lightship technology, derived from gamified digital comic content, produced by Legends of Marvel, DC, Heavy Metal and other incredible studios!
Lookout for easter eggs and rabbit holes as the digital anthology develops, as there are multiple layers of experience depending on how deep you dare to go.
Source: Rebel Studios
It is always cool to chat with Stewart, it is such an opportunity to learn new stuff and Stewart and the team sound like they are on to something quite exciting with EY3K0Ns. It will be really interesting to see just how deep things do go. Will player interactions have an outcome on the story? What variation in experiences will the players unlock from the story, as the possibilities really are endless? EY3K0Ns sounds truly exciting, and to top it off the NFT implementation also seems like the only decent one I have seen so far in the whole of gaming.
The first issue of EY3K0N drops on December 22nd and it is going to be so exciting to see how this unique game unfolds with its narrative, long term game design and integration with new technologies. For more information follow EY3K0N on Twitter or view their website.
