On March 1, 2010 Activision reported the firing of two senior employees to the Security and Exchange Commission. One of these employees was Jason West the Infinity Ward president, game director, co-CCO, and CTO. The other was Vince Zampella the CEO and co-founder of Infinity Ward.
They were dismissed and replaced by Activision, the same company who helped fund their own company Infinity Ward during the golden days of their Call of Duty franchise.
-Jason West on left and Vince Zampella on right
On April 12, 2010, the Los Angeles Times wrote an article about West and Zampella’s new ambitious venture. They were forming a new game developing studio called Respawn Entertainment.
West and Zampella got funding from Electronic Arts (EA) while keeping all intellectual property. After hearing about West and Zampella leaving and starting a new project, a bunch of their old employees from Infinity Ward left to join thier LLC, Respawn.
In June 2013, they debuted Titanfall their new and revolutionary take on first person shooters. The game was released on March 11, 2014 only for xbox. By October 5th of 2015 IGN reported that Titanfall’s sales passed 10 million globally (awesome for a game only on xbox). Recently they have been even more successful with their multi-platform sequel, Titanfall 2.
-Respawn developing team
Official site: http://www.respawn.com/
Los Angeles Times article on Respawn: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/12/entertainment/la-et-ct-callofduty12-2010apr12
IGN article on 1o million in Titanfall sales: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10/05/titanfall-sales-pass-10-million-globally
This is really cool to see how these two guys didn’t give up on their passion of creating games, even after being let go by such a big franchise. It’s great that only after a few years they were able to turn around and create Titanfall which has seen some great success!
I think its awesome that these entrepreneurs were driven despite their circumstances. I think its awesome that they were led by their passions and what they wanted to do rather then what their circumstances seemed to dictate to them. I know titan fall was and still is a huge success and I can’t even imagine the huge success these founders would have missed out on if they had given up after being let go and never would have taken the initiative to follow their passions,