Andrew Willmott. Dan Moskowitz and Ocean Quigley have left EA/Maxis and have started a new studio called Jellygrade that will make Simulation games. The first one they are working on is about the dawn of life on earth; about lava, water, rock and the emergence of the first primordial creatures. They’re currently building the game engine and first focus on making the game for iPad. I am looking forward to this game and would like to wish the best of luck to these three guys on their new endeavor.
You can follow Jellygrade on both Tumblr and Twitter.
Big news – I'm starting a new studio with @andrewwillmott & @moskow23 to make simulation games. We're calling it @jellygrade.
— Ocean Quigley (@oceanquigley) July 16, 2013
We were lead developers on SimCity, SimCity 4, Spore and The Sims2. We love making simulations.
— Ocean Quigley (@oceanquigley) July 16, 2013
We're making a simulation about the dawn of life on earth; about lava, water, rock and the emergence of the first primordial creatures.
— Ocean Quigley (@oceanquigley) July 16, 2013
Good riddance in my opinion. He was very arrogant towards fans before, during and after SimCity launch. I find it funny how some people go all “looks like EA is doing bad” when in fact, this was probably best that could happen for Maxis, along with getting rid of Lucy Bradshaw as head of Maxis.
It’s easy for us to assume that EA ruined SimCity when developers were ones who made all those mistakes we complain about. EA doesn’t care about city sizes, they don’t care about gameplay – EA just wanted game to include DRM and have it online so it can’t be pirated (and even that is questionable as we have no valid proof of such statement). Rest was fault of producers who failed to deliver a great game.
[not directed at this post, just in general] But sure.. jump on “I hate EA because everyone else says they are bad” bandwagon and blame everything bad onto them and cherish development team which failed you several times. DRM didn’t ruin SimCity, Maxis did, and that’s something fans need to realize.
Were producers able to give us larger cities? Yes, and very easily that is. Were producers able to give us terraforming? Yes. So why didn’t they? Oh, wait.. it was their “vision of challenge” not to give us terraforming.
Cheers to them for starting their own studio, and good luck. But I’m in no way missing them as part of Maxis team.
It’s a shame that they’re leaving the Maxis team. I absolutely love Ocean Quigley (he’s great to chat to!), along with Andrew & Dan.
@Everborn – I wouldn’t want Lucy to leave. Minus the SimCity launch, she’s done a pretty good job of leading the Maxis Label since Luc Barthelet resigned after EA closed The Sims Online/EA-Land.
I don’t want her to leave Maxis either, but considering the fact Maxis had no success ever since The Sims 2 (excluding being featured on last few EPs of The Sims 3), I think that finding a better head executive would be best. I’m not saying she did awful, but I think it should and could be better 🙂
From what I understood, she’s still with Maxis, just not head of the team. I kinda got to dislike Lucy for bluntly lying to community about things we knew about. I never experience such things with developers from The Sims Studios. Grant and Graham openly speak about bad things in games and why it’s so. But with SimCity team it was a whole different story.
I just hope that Maxis makes a 180 turn on SimCity after this and actually implements things found in the survey (offline mode, terraforming, larger cities and region editing). 🙂
If they were who were behind the always online or the many restrictions in the game engine then dood riddance.
Sounds to me like they probably left because EA is forcing them to backtrack on a lot of things, and blaming them for what has gone wrong.
Maybe know they will make a patch that allows true offline play, larger cities and more realistic agents.