Led by a team of industry veterans, gaming company Midnight emerged from stealth to announce $7.5M of seed funding earmarked to build a studio and platform to create never-ending stories.
Midnight’s mission is to build games for players first, that delight players with both never-ending experiences and economic participation. To achieve this, it’s building a slate of free-to-play & premium games for diverse audiences, with a novel web3-based ‘forging’ system that creates true interoperability and a robust economy. The company, founded in late 2021, now has more than 60 people working on 4 titles and is scaling rapidly.
Midnight is led by some of the gaming industry’s most commercially successful creators. Its executive team includes acting CPO Chris Heatherly, recently EVP Games for NBCUniversal and GM of Disney Mobile Games; head of game design Geoffrey Hunt, designer of commercially successful 4X games like Star Trek: Fleet Command and Game of War: Fire Age; and CCO Bill Roper, IGN’s #41 game designer of all time for his contributions to Diablo, Warcraft and StarCraft whose recent roles include helming Disney Interactive Central Creative and as CCO at Improbable.
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The company was founded by CEO Steve Wade, a prominent gaming investment banker who’s also built & sold 3 game companies; and CTO Steven Spagnolo, Chief Technology Officer at SoundCloud, Senior Director of Technology for King and founder of Blue Tongue Entertainment (acquired by THQ) and Twiitch (acquired by GREE). Rounding out the core team are art director Darren Pattenden, who has held art leadership roles at EA, Trion Worlds, Manticore and 2K Games; and acting CMO Anthony Gabriele, recently head of marketing and GM at SoundCloud and director of subscription marketing for Apple’s media and entertainment businesses.
Midnight has raised $7.5M of seed funding led by Shima Capital and a who’s-who of crypto gaming investors, including blockchain platform Forte, popular gaming community SNACKCLUB, guild and mod platform Overwolf, the founders of gaming companies Illuvium and investors Woodstock Fund, FJ Labs, Bixin Ventures and more.
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“Midnight stands out from the crowd. Their pitch – to focus on building great and accessible games for diverse audiences; to use blockchain technology as a layer that creates real value and utility for players, rather than a crutch; and to meaningfully weave connections through the games, to create a universe of IP – is unique in the space. Shima thoroughly believes in Midnight’s team of industry heavy-hitters to make this vision a reality,” says Shima Capital’s Yida Gao. Adds CEO and founder Steve Wade, “While others are betting that fake ‘ownership’ and its associated economics will bring the masses to boring NFT-driven games, we firmly believe that participation and a secondary market need to be both meaningful and additive to players’ stories. Our games are designed to be fun without the NFT layer, and we are targeting the broadest swath of gamers. It shouldn’t matter whether someone is crypto-native or not – they’ll find something for them at Midnight.”
Games already in development at Midnight include Legion, a 4X MMO; Next Protectors, a 2D pixel brawler; and At Your Service, a couch co-op. The company plans to build a vibrant slate of 1st and 3rd party games across platforms and genres for diverse audiences. More information on the titles, and on the platform that ties them together, will be released in coming months.
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