PopCap's New 4th & Battery Studio Aims For 'Weirdness'

Game developer and distributor PopCap has a new creative "sandbox" - a development studio called 4th & Battery that aims to deliver "smaller, simpler and sometimes edgier games" to market faster than is possible within the traditional business-driven game development framework, the company said Tuesday.

4th & Battery titles will initially be aimed at Facebook, PCs and Apple's iOS-based devices, the company said. The new studio's first release, Unpleasant Horse, is due to hit the App Store later in April.

The new studio gives current PopCap developers a chance to work outside of the company's "intense internal filters" and showcase the "fledgling games hiding within our walls that never see the light of day," according to Allard.

PopCap CEO Jason Kapelka told PCMag.com that Battery & 4th evolved from 24-hour "hackathons" and a week-long "Pop Camp" that the company holds to give developers a chance to create outside of the bounds and pressures of mainstream game development.

"People either wouldn't want to take the free time or didn't use it to do anything," Kapelka said. So PopCap experimented with more structured exercises like the hackathons and the Pop Camp, eventually leading to Battery & 4th.