Add one part GameFly co-founder, one part EA technical art director, three-quarters Shanghai, a dash of Bellevue, WA, ice cubes, and shake with creativity.  Serve into bite sized entertainment over PC’s, Internet, handhelds, and iPhones to create the Red Rocket Games special.

And serve it up they do at Red Rocket.  Jung Suh, Gamefly co-founder and Scott Yu, EA technical art director have set out to merge gaming trends from Asia such as microtransactions and avatar systems with US game design practices.  The company is headquartered in Shanghai, China, with offices in Bellevue, WA.  They’re tackling the project head on, with an ambitious first release date as early as early 2009 via their own portal as well as other casual game distributors and publishers.

Not limited just to just a Chinese and American development crew, Red Rocket features a global pool of talent working from around the world: China, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, France and the US.  Both Suh and Yu agree that their Chinese location has a number of benefits including the ability to outsource non-core project elements to local firms and being able to manage them closely.

“We have an international group of mad scientists here at our Shanghai office, and everyone is tinkering around with the concepts of fun as we develop our first game,” says Suh.

“It’s a great benefit to be here in China and be able to take advantage of the talent and excitement around online gaming, while at the same time having a management team with years of U.S. game development methodology experience garnered from top video game brand companies.”

Red Rocket’s now CEO, Jung Suh formerly served as GameFly’s VP of Content, while Yu takes on the role of Executive Producer.  Together the team has more that 15 years experience with companies including EA, Pogo.com, Sega, Activision, and Disney Online.

Their goal is ambitious: Bring the East – West.  Sadly with a reputation of delivering low quality titles coming out of the East, here’s to hoping that Red Rocket can truly get the mix right and break down the barriers of preconception with some truly awe inspiring pixel magic.

Visit Red Rocket Games at www.redrocketgames.com.

Tags: activision, avatar systems, EA, gamefly, Jung Suh, mad scientists, Pogo.com, red rocket, red rocket games, Scott Yu, Seg

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under industry news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.