Ovosonico (www.ovosonico.com) is the new games and music production company founded by industry veteran and former Grasshopper Manufacture Director Massimo Guarini.
The name “Ovosonico” is an Italian word meaning “sonic egg“.

Ovosonico is steadily based on a very precise and strong vision.
The entertainment business is rapidly changing into a blurred virtual space of different arts and disciplines converging together.
Ovosonico, thanks to the interdisciplinary experience of its members, embraces this convergence and goes with the flow.

Making games is rewarding, but creating real entertainment brands is a better strategy in the long term, both in terms of revenue and creative expression.

We understand the big limits of the old, traditional triple-A business model, and rather than opposing ourselves to the change, we embrace it, we take inspiration from it, coming out with new ideas.

Our mission is to create gaming experiences taking advantage of other media, our passion for music and pop-culture, and our keen eye for creative communication.

Ovosonico is definitely not the typical game development studio you would expect to see. It’s rather what every game studio should become in the next future in order to stay in the business.
Bold statement? We are born to be ambitious.

Ovosonico will deal with game productions for new emerging platforms (iOS, PSN, XBLA), as well as music and movies productions, eventually blending all these elements into a single entertainment product.

“I am glad to have this rare opportunity to contribute in a pro-active way to the growth of our industry, but most importantly to give players all around the world that fresh wave of oxygen they’ve been asking for a long time.”

Massimo Guarini

Read more about Ovosonico in the exclusive Gamespot interview.

MASSIMO GUARINI
Visionary Creative Director with 14 years experience in the industry.
Directed the acclaimed “Shadows of the Damned” with Suda51, Shinji Mikami and Akira Yamaoka, for Grasshopper Manufacture in Tokyo.
At Ubisoft Montreal, he directed “Naruto – Rise of a Ninja“, awarded by IGN with the E3 2007 Best Fighting Game award.

GIANNI RICCIARDI
The most well regarded Audio Director and Music Composer in Italy with more than 12 years experience in the games industry, worked with Ubisoft, Capcom and Namco for brands like Tom Clancy, Rayman, Moto GP, Raving Rabbids.
Polyhedric artist with vast experience ranging from handheld and mobile to Kinect and Move.

PROUDLY MADE IN ITALY
Ovosonico is located in the heart of Europe, in Milan, Italy.
Promoting local and foreign talents, and taking competitive advantage from the Italian tradition for design, fashion and art, Ovosonico will operate internationally targeting the worldwide market.

Shadows of the Damned director Massimo Guarini speaks about the studio’s new global synthesis of creativity and technology, why his personal vision fits better with a Japanese studio, and what we can expect from Grasshopper Manufacture in the future.

While Grasshopper Manufacture came to prominence thanks in large part to an unfettered creativity generally perceived to be very Japanese, the truth of the matter is that CEO Goichi Suda has always been incredibly influenced by Western culture. Still, the studio had almost exclusively employed Japanese developers, and worked with Japanese publishers — but times have changed.

As the studio expands to support multiple projects, Suda has moved into the role of executive director or creative producer on many of its projects — leaving the day-to-day management of teams in the hands of others, like Massimo Guarini, the director of Shadows of the Damned. its game for EA — released this week.

The game, published by EA and launching this week, marks the emergence of international talents at the studio, and is also Grasshopper’s debut using Western-developed technology, Unreal Engine 3.

In this interview, Guarini, who worked for Ubisoft in the West, speaks about this global synthesis of creativity and technology, why his personal vision fits better with a Japanese studio, and what we can expect from Grasshopper Manufacture in the future.

 

You came to Grasshopper having had a background working at Ubisoft. What did you bring to a Japanese development studio that made it appealing for them?

Massimo Guarini: Well, I think, basically, passion. I mean, I’ve been working for a long time in Ubisoft. In the Western industry I’ve been always very passionately interested in Japanese culture, and especially the Japanese game industry, so as soon as I had an opportunity I jumped in.

And I would say from a creative point of view, my vision and my style, is very much more in sync, I would say, with the Japanese way of dealing with contents and creating new contents. So for me despite all of the challenges about working and living in Japan, it was kind of a natural passage, and I’m still very much thrilled about this.

Were you able to influence the style of production in any way? Or did Grasshopper have production sorted out in a way that you could more just come in and concentrate on creative?

MG: Fortunately, I had an opportunity to influence quite a bit of the game at Grasshopper because… Grasshopper is changing internally and it’s growing as a company. That means Suda-san cannot follow personally all the projects; his role is now one of the executive director of most of the projects, and he’s also president of the company. And that means he needs to rely on directors in order to follow multiple projects.

So I’m very much thankful to him for giving me this opportunity to be in control, actually, about the project. Obviously still he’s the executive director on the project, so he’s still checking and gives feedback on all the things, but I had pretty much freedom to give influence to the game. And we also share taste and style, so we had this kind of luck to be very much in sync, I would say.

Do you have any examples?

MG: Definitely being surreal and grotesque. It comes really natural for Suda-san to come up with jokes, or visual situations, that literally lets you say, “WTF!?” And that’s also something I pretty much enjoy and like. And when I brought up, you know, the Evil Dead series and Sam Raimi in general as an influence for this kind of game and for this kind of style that we’re going to go with a horror, it was totally in for that. So that’s the kind of taste that we kind of share.

When Suda said it was “Sid & Nancy in hell,” that made me smile. But do you think that’s apt?

MG: No, I mean that’s honestly what he thinks and I believe it’s true. (laughs) I mean, we can go on forever about inspirations, examples from movies and things because we really, really took a lot of inspirations from other things — not just video games. So I believe you’re going to find a homage to movies from the ’70s, from the ’80s, from the ’90s in every single chapter of the game.

A lot of people accuse video games of taking too much from cinema, but it’s usually a very narrow strip of cinema that ends up influencing games.

MG: Yeah, I think so. From a canonical point of view, we’re not taking influence from movies plainly, like other games are doing. We’re creators and developers which are not kids anymore. So our background is one of like 35 to 40 years old people, right? And we have a huge background of movies and cinema, and we just blend it, mix it. We just come out up with a melting pot; it’s not just like taking the single bits. And that makes possible to add a flavor to the game, rather than just like barely come up with the very same situation of the movie. That’s what I mean.

It’s like the difference when you take artistic influence versus using something as a template.

MG: Absolutely, same difference. Although, I have to be honest, there’s a couple of situations in the game where I have personally the fun –- I really wanted to do it, I really wanted to take a specific bit of a movie and represent it in game form just to make the fans happy and just to make people smile and laugh. But I’ll leave it to you to find it out, but it’s pretty much obvious, I think.

Interactively, or in terms of cutscenes?

MG: Interactively.

Yeah, interactively? That has to be challenging.

MG: It is. It’s blended to gameplay and that homage is like three seconds, four seconds long, but it’s very passionate. So that was really fun and challenging to do.

You’re the director of the project. When this game was announced it was like “the Suda/Mikami thing.” How much creative control do you have on the project? How much have you been able to bring your view to it?

MG: Honestly, I’ve had pretty much the same amount of creative control since the very beginning, since when I joined the project. Obviously probably that was not exposed to the media beforehand, so that’s why you just happen to hear my name only now.

Well, it grabs the headlines to mention big names like that. But ultimately games in general — not specifically this game — often… there’s a lot of people behind the scenes, doing the work that actually makes the game happen.

MG: Absolutely. Behind Shadows of the Damned it’s just an entire team of people, and I have to say there’s also a very interesting environment — because, first off, it’s a Japanese company, but it employs also a good number of foreign employees. They come in from every single country in the world; we have a sort of global melting pot.

So that influences, a lot, the style of the game because everybody brings a piece of their own culture. So the theme itself was able to actually come out with this kind of mix, and that’s quite interesting I think.

READ MORE
The full-length feature interview explores the gestation of Shadows of the Damned, and is live now on Gamasutra.