In the fallout from the Activision dismantling of Infinity Ward, the two heads of that studio, Jason West and Vince Zampella, moved on to create Respawn Entertainment. Respawn has since signed with EA and their partners program. Which has naturally led to questions about what exactly the new studio is working on for EA. Well, no one knows, not even EA.Â
David DeMartini, the man in charge of the EA Partners program and hence responsible for the money that EA is providing Respawn has told Eurogamer that he couldn’t tell what Respawn was working on because he doesn’t know.Â
“The thing everybody needs to remember is [Respawn is] starting [from] absolute zero,” said DeMartini. “This is two guys who really know what they’re doing having to go find a place for the team, buy chairs and desks and furniture, find new technology from the ground up, and pull a team together. I need to get HR people. There are contracts. There are all kinds of things and administration that need to take place. Amongst all that administration they’ve pulled together the core of a fantastic team and they’re starting to work on a whole bunch of ideas to try and find what is going to be the one right idea for us.”
Prior to this DeMartini spoke about his feelings regarding Activision and whether or not he was happy to take Jason West and Vince Zampella away from them. For DeMartini he seems to be happier just to have provided West and Zampella with jobs so that they could keep making games.Â
It shouldn’t be a surprise that it isn’t clear what Respawn is working on, but now we know just how unclear it is. No one at EA knows, which likely means that Respawn is still a good 2 years away from releasing their first game.Â
In the meantime the franchise that West, Zampella, and most of the Respawn team left, Call of Duty, is once again set to sweep the holiday season with Treyarch’s Black Ops installation. Even with no game to show from Respawn, this story will remain interesting for years to come.Â
