https://refinedgeekery.com/2015/03/16/getting-to-know-moon-studios/
One of the most fascinating stories surrounding
Ori is not the game itself, but the unique development team, Moon Studios, that brought it to life.
Moon Studios is not your typical development team. It is an international collaboration of former AAA developers, working together remotely across great distances. Team members are located anywhere from Austria, to Israel, to the US and Canada, to Australia.
The studio was formed by former Blizzard character artist, Thomas Mahler, who serves as CEO of the studio. Working out of Austria, Mahler co-founded the studio with Gennadiy Korol (Israel) who also serves as lead engineer for Moon. The two began development of their first title “Warsoup”, an RTS-FPS hybrid, back in 2010. Less than a year later, the partnership with Microsoft was formed and the four year development cycle on
Ori began.
While the game is published by Microsoft Game Studios, the team remains wholly independent. If anything, the relationship has given them many of the benefits of a first party development while being able to maintain their unique structure, one seemingly poorly fit with the typical first party system.
Describing the relationship on Reddit,
OriProgrammer Willem Vos noted: “One of the cool things about Microsoft being involved in the process of building the game, was that they have an experienced and outsider vision.”
The game drew initial inspiration from a marriage of both old-school gaming mechanics and traditional forms of both Japanese and Western animation.
Speaking with Polygon, Mahler described the old-school nostalgia that lives on gaming forums like NeoGAF: “I grew up playing
Super Metroid and I want games like that again.
I read NeoGAF and constantly read how they want games like this but it’s not being done.”
Having just released the game, it is still too early to predict where Moon Studios may go next.
Ori as a property is owned by Microsoft and while the studio is certainly attached to their creation, there is that feeling that they want to be more than a single property development house. Vos recalled a quote from a developer of Runic Game, the makers of Torchlight and Torchlight II in which they said “We don’t want to be the company that makes Torchlight”, adding “I can definitely see what they were saying there.” He added “Moon is capable of a lot of different types of games” and while he admits that another
Ori game would be cool, little is known about the studio’s future plans, even within the team.