Amy Hennig, Uncharted Creator, Has Left EA and Is Not Working on Anything Star Wars Related
Amy Hennig, the creator of the Uncharted series, left Naughty Dog back in 2014 to go work on an undisclosed Star Wars project over at EA. Back in October, it was announced that the Star Wars title would be delayed, moved to another team, and the studio in charge, Visceral Games, was to be shut down. Since we’ve gotten that unfortunate news last year, there has been no new developments on the Star Wars game, and most importantly, no news on what’s happening with Amy Hennig.
Luckily, Eurogamer managed to speak with Hennig at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona about her position at EA, the Star Wars project, and what she’s up to nowadays. When she was asked about her current title over at EA, Amy gave Eurogamer the news that she actually parted ways with the publisher back in January of this year and has gone on to start up her own independent studio.
“I have not worked at EA since January, technically, legally. Yes. This is the problem, it was hard enough for them, but people were immediately asking them ‘is Amy working with you?’ and the answer was ‘well, we’re in negotiations…’ like, hmm. It was, sort of the soft pedal answer.
I haven’t been in, but look – I get along with all those people, I consider even the guys on the exec team friends. But it made it awkward because it was like, ‘I never got the chance to announce that I’m not at EA so I need to just pull off that band-aid at some point – but also had nothing to announce. It makes it sound like I just went home! But I’m doing all this stuff, working on all kinds of things.
I’m working independently and staying independent. I just started my own small little independent studio and am consulting with some people. I’m hoping to bring some people on board, I would love to have a little company of about six to eight people, 15 at the most, and do some more projects, do some VR stuff – I’m consulting with some VR companies and doing a ton of research because I haven’t played a lot to immerse myself in it.
So yeah, I’m not doing anything Star Wars. And, who knows what the future may hold, but that project is on the shelf now.
The Vancouver studio is working on something pretty different. It’s really not… Y’know, once you go more open world it’s such a different game to the one we were making. Everybody loved what we were doing and I’d love to see us resurrect that somehow, but it’s complicated.”
It’s unfortunate that we won’t be getting a linear-ish Star Wars game written by Hennig any longer, but we’re more than definitely sure that Hennig’s talents won’t be going to waste. Her VR projects that she is currently working on are probably very early in development but it will more than likely be something truly special and unique.