Just a few months after his surprise departure from Ubisoft, where he'd been serving as the creative director on the mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe, veteran developer Clint Hocking has founded a game studio called Build Machine Games.
Hocking's new outfit is "lean and fast," he wrote on LinkedIn, but also "bold and ambitious."
"We aspire to expand the expressive range and power of the medium with emotionally resonant, socially relevant games that challenge players' perspectives, pre-conceptions and empathy as much as their reasoning and reflexes."
There's a similar aspirational-yet-smacking-of-LinkedIn vibe on the Build Machine Games website, where you'll see a list of "values" that includes things like "Lead From the Front," "Always Attack," and "Challenge to Improve." Of course, there's also a mission statement: "Our mission is to make great games that exceed expectations and elevate the form by empowering passionate developers with autonomy and accountability, and supporting them with inspiring vision, agile practices and cutting edge technology."
Okay, look: That's all very fluffy and corporate, and thus easy to poke fun at, but Hocking comes to the table with an impressive CV: He was a level designer and scriptwriter on the original Splinter Cell, after which he served as creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, Crucible (for Amazon), and Watch Dogs: Legion. He also spent some time at Valve, possibly working on the still-waiting-for-it Left 4 Dead 3, and you don't get a gig at Valve unless you're really pretty good at your job.
That's also what makes Hocking's most recent split from Ubisoft seem cloudy. He was serving as creative director on Hexe, the codename for the supernatural-coded Assassin's Creed that was announced in 2022, but left without warning in February. Ubisoft thanked him for his contributions and wished him the best, using language that very much reminded me of the equally surprising departure, just a few months earlier, of Assassin's Creed franchise head Marc-Alexis Côté.
That split turned badly quickly—Côté quickly alleged that he'd been forced out, and sued Ubisoft over it in January—and while there's been no sign of such ugliness related to Hocking's exit, it sure does feel like there was a shakeup at Ubisoft (well, there undeniably was), and he didn't fit into the plan.
All of which is to say that, despite the highly-polished say-nothing of the Build Machine website, Hocking has a very strong background and I'm eager to find out what he's got cooking. No great shock that I've got a long wait for that: The studio is currently hiring for a "small number" of positions to start work on its first prototype. But there's more good news there, too. Hocking's studio is currently only hiring residents of Canada, so whatever's going on, you know it's bound to be cool.
