Zynga Hires Brian Reynolds As Chief Designer

By Chris Sherman On June 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Today social gaming giant Zynga announced that it was hiring Brian Reynolds to fill the newly-created of Chief Designer at the company. This is a very significant appointment in light of Reynolds's veteran status within the mainstream PC gaming industry. Reynolds was part of the founding team at Firaxis and Big Huge Games Studios, as well as designing numerous classic PC strategy titles including Civilization II, Alpha Centauri, and Rise of Nations.

"Brian is not only of the most widely respect game designers, he is also
uniquely gifted in that he has mastered the art of programming," said
Mark Pincus, CEO and founder, Zynga. "Brian’s dual specialty gives him
the substantial advantage of being able to bring his own visions to
life. He has built a reputation for finely tuned game-play."

Reynolds will lead Zynga's product development team in the future and oversee the creation of new social strategy games at Zynga's new Baltimore-based Zynga East studio. The new studio will open with 12-15 employees including artists, producers, other game designers, and web developers. The studio will be tasked with creating new games for the Facebook platform, particularly games with a strategic element to the gameplay.

Zynga's hire of Reynolds suggests that the social gaming scene may be ready to begin maturing its product on a gameplay level. Lawsuits alleging plagiarism are currently rife in the space and many social text RPGs are so similar that LOLapps is reportedly at work on whitelabel software that would generate them automatically. Zynga's high-profile hire of Reynolds is similar to Wonderhill's emphasis on having the game design services of Nick Rush, an implicit promise that the company is going to try to ultimately deliver different and better games than the competition.