‘Ng:como will feel like first-party for iPhone games’

New iPhone games publisher ng:moco will step into the gap Apple has yet to occupy and be the ‘spiritual first-party’ for games on the platform, says founder Neil Young.

Talking to Newsweek’s Level Up blog, Young – whose venture was announced earlier this week after his departure from EA in mid-June – said he wants his new firm to reassure customers that quality games are being designed exclusively for the device.

"I want customers to feel like there’s somebody out there that’s building games, that’s financing games, that’s helping games get made that take advantage of what the device does really well, and gets beyond porting a PSP game or a DS game," he said.

At EA Young was famous for starting experimental alternate reality game Majestic and having a key hand in projects developed at the publisher’s West Coast USA development studios and also recently founding the Blueprint unit for new games on emergent platforms like Facebook.

Now his new venture, ng:moco (which stands for next-generation mobile company), will target emergent mobile platforms, starting with Apple’s.

He added: "The iPhone is a unique device, right? It has a camera in it. It will be a 3G phone. It will have GPS. It has a touch screen. It has accelerometers. It’s got good graphics performance. It’s got all your media on there. My instinct is, the type of games that will make people want to buy more iPhones or more devices of that class are the types of things that really showcase the capabilities and bring what we know as game designers together with what Apple has delivered as a platform to create compelling and exciting new experiences."