Microsoft’s executive vice president at gaming Phil Spencer has hinted at The Initiative possibly being rebooting an old Xbox intellectual property.
The Santa Monica-based studio was revealed at E3 2018, and since then, we’ve not heard anything official about what the studio is currently working on.
Spencer has shared on Twitter that the developers are now “challenging themselves to do new things things (and old things 🙂 ) in new ways.”
That “old things” has been seen as a tease for the return of an old Xbox IP under the umbrella of the new studio. The teaser is not the first time that Spencer himself links The Initiative with a reboot of this kind.
At E3 2018, in a post Xbox media briefing Inside Xbox livestream, he suggested that, together with studio head Darrell Gallagher, “we were talking about some things in our past that might be interesting,” as reminded by VGC.
Spencer’s tweet came shortly after a meeting where Gallagher and other members of the studio provided him and Xbox Game Studios’ head Matt Booty with an “update” about the state of work on their first title.
Dormient Xbox intellectual properties include Fable, which is rumored to be rebooted at Playground Games’ second team, and Perfect Dark Zero that perhaps could suit The Initiative’s efforts to craft a big open-world title.
The development team is still recruiting and has hired many artists and designers in the recent past from talented studios, such as Rockstar Games, Naughty Dog, and Santa Monica Studio. Among the others, Red Dead Redemption‘s writer and Sunset Overdrive‘s game director have been made part of the staff early in the process.
According to Matt Booty, we’ll learn the first details regarding the project in 2020, so there’s a chance that we could get at least a teaser at E3 next June.
