Former Uncharted, Last of Us game designer joins Xbox Game Studios' The Initiative

By Asher Madan
published

Bring in the talent.

Recently, Darrell Gallagher, Studio Head of The Initiative, announced that acclaimed developers like Brian Westergaard, Annie Lohr, Blake Fischer, Christian Cantamessa, and Lindsey McQueeney were now a part of the team. Microsoft founded The Initiative last year so that it could build quality Microsoft exclusives like God of War or Uncharted. It seems like the company has the developers to do just that because these individuals have worked on such games before.

Today, news surfaced that another former Naughty Dog developer had joined The Initiative. Robert Ryan is now the Senior Systems Designer at Microsoft's studio, but he previously worked on games like Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us: Part II. We verified this information through LinkedIn (opens in new tab) after the post by Twitter user "Klobrille."

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It's great to see that the team is hiring incredibly experienced people. Hopefully we'll get a glimpse of what they're working on at E3 2019. However, given the fact that it takes years to make games, that may not happen. Right now, The Initiative wants to stay small so that it can experiment with a variety of different games.

Apart from that, the team also looks wants to manage expectations because recently Gallagher said that he wants The Initiative "staying small" and "staying agile." Microsoft's first-party lineup has been heavily criticized this generation, so the studio has quite the task ahead of it.

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Asher Madan
Asher Madan

Asher Madan handles gaming news for Windows Central. Before joining Windows Central in 2017, Asher worked for a number of different gaming outlets. He has a background in medical science and is passionate about all forms of entertainment, cooking, and antiquing.

6 Comments
  • Competition is good for end consumers, not in the case of Microsoft though. Takes years to come up with something good.
  • "sound of crickets chirping"......
  • I don't think that's true for smaller teams.
  • Like Last Guardian right? 10 years in the making but sold lesser than Persona 5 (around 2m WW)
  • 10 years and only 2m copies?
  • Assuming every game has the same digital and disc ratio. Persona5 and Nier is around 2m WW.
    Nioh and Last Guardian sold lesser.