Two fledgling video game companies are set to move into the Louisiana Technology Park’s Level Up Lab after receiving approval from the Tech Park’s admissions committee today.
The companies are Iron 27, a digital gaming company, and Procedural Reality, a game development firm that has been working out of the Tech Park’s incubator.
The Level Up Lab is already home to four game development studios that are hoping to release independent games in 2016, and Procedural Reality brings that number to five. Those companies, recently featured in Business Report, are creating games in genres that stretch from musical adventure to a driving/action game reminiscent of the iconic Road Rash game.
“We believe that digital game development will play an important role in diversifying and strengthening the regional economy,” says Stephen Loy, executive director of the Louisiana Technology Park, in a statement. “Gaming offers numerous benefits, including: tapping out-of-state revenue sources, building local technology infrastructure, and generating jobs for local artists and technologists.”
Iron 27 will focus on game development and trying to bring new, innovative games to market. The company’s current project will allow players to play as both a group of dungeon raiders and the builders those raiders are trying to outsmart.
“Many mobile gaming products suffer from a severe lack of innovation; a lot of new games are just imitations,” says Iron 27 President Joel Tubre, a business graduate of LSU, in a statement. “I’m happy to be able to innovate from my home in Louisiana.”
Tubre comes back home to Baton Rouge from Nashville after running several other companies, including the successful online retailer Tiger Imports.
Josh Parnell, founder of Procedural Reality, is deep in the middle of creating Limit Theory, an open-world procedural sci-fi game in which algorithms create a realistic environment with elements of randomness where nothing is ever the same twice, allowing gamers to theoretically craft a story that never ends.
The additions bring the Tech Park’s occupancy to 27 businesses, which is the largest occupancy to date.
