So Long, Freeverse, and Thanks For All The Fish
About four hours ago, Colin Lynch Smith, Vice President for well-known Mac and iOS game developer and publisher Freeverse, sent out a tweet which caused us a great deal of sadness:
“Last day at Freeverse, long may she sail!”
We queried him about his tweet, and received this response: “No immediate plans, just taking some time off. Freeverse goes on, but without Ian and I. Weird!”
Ian refers to Colin’s brother, Ian Lynch Smith. Colin and Ian both co-founded Freeverse back in 1994 and have since contributed not just great games to the Mac game community, but significantly to the actual culture of Mac gaming. In early 2010 ngmoco acquired Freeverse, and many in the game community questioned what that would mean for Freeverse. The company swore that they would continue as an independent entity…at least for the near future.
And at least for the first half of 2010 that seemed the case. Numerous iOS games were released under the Freeverse brand, including Warpgate and Pride, Prejudice and Zombies. But as the year ran on fewer games were revealed. In 2011, no game announcements came from Freeverse at all. And looking at the ngmoco site, one finds one game developed by Freeverse after late 2010…an android game called Dragoncraft.
And now it comes to this…the founders themselves have left. They are not the first of the key members of the Freeverse team to have left since the ngmoco sale, but they are the most painful. Because they ARE Freeverse.
Note: Toucharcade has a great write-up about this on their site.
