Blumhouse Productions may be best known for its low-budget yet hugely successful horror movies – Paranormal Activity, Get Out, and most recently, the killer robot opus, M3GAN – but it’s now branching out into games.
Called Blumhouse Games, logically enough, the interactive arm of the company will focus on producing games with budgets below $10 million, according to a report at IGN.
Zach Wood is heading up the new division, whose credits include the indie darling The Unfinished Swan, and Don Sechler, who previously worked in publisher and developer relations at Sony.
“For some time we have been looking to build out a team to start accessing the growth opportunity in interactive media,” said Blumhouse boss Abhijay Prakash in a statement. “When we sat with Zach and Don they articulated an approach that resonated with Blumhouse’s model and we knew it was a perfect place for us to start our push into the interactive space. With their experience, sensibility and knowledge of the gaming marketplace Zach and Don are the ideal leaders to leverage Blumhouse’s unique genre strengths into gaming.”
It’s a logical move for Blumhouse, particularly given the company’s playing to its strengths with this new venture; from Paranormal Activity onwards, it’s specialised in producing big independent hits from small budgets. Taking the same approach with video games could prove similarly fruitful, particularly given that some of the industry’s most innovative, eerie horror experiences have come from the indie side.
Daymare: 1998, Mothmen 1966, Signalis, and Stories Untold are all examples of great, chilling experiences made by tiny studios. If Blumhouse Games can help smaller teams make more titles like those, then that can only be good.
If nothing else, it increases the possibility of us getting a side-scrolling beat-’em-up based on M3GAN over the next couple of years or so.
