OneBigGame Founder Speaks Up on Games for Charity

May 29, 2007


Gamers continue to give back.

Gamasutra sat down recently with Guerrilla Games co-founder Martin de Ronde, who founded OneBigGame, a non-profit game publisher formed to raise money for children's charities around the world.

Similar to Band Aid and Live Aid, OneBigGame aims to bring together game designers to produce and sell games to raise funds for various causes. From the Gamasutra interview:
Can you talk a bit about how and when you were inspired to start the organization?

It literally was a late-night inspiration. I was watching a documentary on the 20th anniversary of Band Aid and said to myself: Why shouldn't something similar be possible in the games industry?

Has there been or are you planning on industry-wide collaborations on bigger games, or do you expect to collect a number of smaller titles from individuals and studios?

The initial focus will be to ask top designers and top development studios to individually create a small casual game, either based on an existing IP that they own or something completely original for OneBigGame....

We will leave the developers free to do what they want, with our only guideline being that the game should be original... and should not contain over the top excessive violence...

Are there any requests specific for political/awareness based games?

Our games will simply be entertainment titles first and foremost. We will leave developers free to incorporate a message, but it's not required. Far from it. When all these artists were performing at the Live Aid concerts all those years ago, they were singing their own songs, not songs about the message of that day...

Prior to going public, OneBigGame had managed to sign up several well-known developers. The group is overseen by an advisory board comprised of  game industry professionals.

Read the entire GamaSutra interview here.

- Reporting from Canada, GP Correspondent Colin "Jabrwock" McInnes
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Comments

Submitted by MachShot (not verified) on Tue, 05/29/2007 - 15:11.
Perhaps Mainstream games could also contribute to this cause as well. It's obvious that many gamers are willing to pay 80-90 dollars for Halo 3 (legendary edition), so future hit games could be a few dollars more, and every purchase of said game would contribute money to a charity of any kind.

Submitted by ffalcon (not verified) on Tue, 05/29/2007 - 15:00.
It's always cool to see someone do a game for a good cause.

Submitted by Velvet Llama (not verified) on Tue, 05/29/2007 - 12:39.
Very very cool
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DorthLous: Will do, my apologies.02/09/2012 - 4:14pm
Andrew Eisen: I appreciate the heads up but please keep typo alerts to the specific article's comments or PMs.02/09/2012 - 3:33pm
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