Halifax mobile game producer Orpheus Interactive will soon release the game version of the wildly popular Sons of Anarchy television series, having reached a deal with Fox Digital Entertainment last year.
Orpheus and Fox issued a statement Monday announcing the new game, Sons of Anarchy: The Prospect, which will be available on phones and tablets in 2015.
The announcement is essentially the debut of Orpheus, which has raised more than $1 million in equity financing and has already assembled a team of 16 veteran game producers in Nova Scotia. It has quickly and quietly become a major addition to the gaming community in the region.
“We’re building an experience for the rabid fans of Sons of Anarchy,” Alastair Jarvis, Executive Producer of the series, said in an interview. “The entertainment landscape is shifting, so people are unplugging cable [TV] and they’re looking for entertainment . . . from the tablet in the palm of their hand. There are a lot of people who have a hunger for it and not that many people who are scratching that itch.”
Orpheus Interactive is an interesting marriage of talent and capital that came together last year. Jarvis, a veteran of HB Studios in Lunenburg, N.S., connected with the Halifax venture capitalist James Drage. They learned of Fox Digital Entertainment’s plans for the Sons of Anarchy games. So they put a team together (which included Drage’s son Christian, who’d been working as a game developer in British Columbia), pitched Fox and landed the licence.
“The things that’s different about this model is we’re not doing this as work for hire for Fox,” said Jarvis. “We own the IP. If we do well the profit, stays in Nova Scotia.”
Just finishing its seventh and final season, Sons of Anarchy is a drama with darkly comedic undertones about an outlaw motorcycle club in the sheltered fictional town of Charming, California. Jarvis said that the series of games produced by Orpheus will allow the fans of the show to get fresh content on the brand even though the TV show is ending.
About 20 people worked on the production of the first game, 16 of them in Nova Scotia. Jarvis said the project has included collaboration with Halifax-based Silverback Games, headed by gaming veteran Willie Stevenson. The voice-overs were done by VoiceWorks Productions, a Los Angeles-area studio headed by Nova Scotian Douglas Carrigan.
Orpheus has raised more than $1 million so far and its first funding round is still open. The current investors include a range of angel investors and Atlantic Venture Capital, the VC fund operated by James Drage.
The initial Sons of Anarchy: The Prospect game will come out next year, and will be followed by a succession of follow-on games in the SoA series.
“Our slate is pretty full with episodes of Sons of Anarchy,” said Jarvis. “But the value is not just in these games but in our capacity to build other games.”
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