CounterSpy Sneaking to PS3, PS Vita

I’m one of the co-founders of Dynamighty, a small independent studio situated in lovely San Francisco, CA. We’re a 10 person team of passionate game makers, founded by myself and my buddy John, who previously worked together at LucasArts, with the core team rounded out by the two Marks. ‘Business’ Mark and Mark Holmes, who before us was at Pixar for 16 years. When Sony asked us to write a quick post to tell you a bit about our game, we met the request with a mix of excitement (“YES! We get to start talking about our game!”) and terror (“Holy [REDACTED]! Now we’ve got to actually deliver…”).

Truthfully, we are super excited to finally be able to start talking about our labor of love, our very first game: CounterSpy (working title), an action side-scrolling game being developed for PlayStation 3, PS Vita, and mobile platforms.

As an elite member of C.O.U.N.T.E.R., your goal is to infiltrate, sabotage, and strike at the heart of two opposing Super Powers embroiled in a frenetic Arms Race that threatens the existence of humanity. You are countering the insane plans of these Cold War foes, raiding their seemingly impregnable bases and undermining their mad military machinations, all before they can launch their ever more ridiculous weapons of mass destruction against each other.

To give you a peek, one of the levels we’ve been working on this month has you going behind the Iron Curtain to raid a secret military base that is preparing a deadly new rocket for launch. As the countdown to launch ticks away, you’ll fight through hordes of well-armed representatives of the card-carrying oligarchy that object to your presence. Get to the rocket in time and you can sabotage the guidance system, causing a launch day explosion and getting you a nice fat bonus from C.O.U.N.T.E.R. HQ. To help you out, you’ve got a broad arsenal at your disposal, including a cool selection of prototype weapons that you will unlock as you steal collections of blueprints.

So a little bit about why we are making this game…

At Dynamighty, we are huge fans of side-scrollers and CounterSpy is our love letter to the genre. These are some of the classic games that shaped our childhood: Flashback, Out of this World, Impossible Mission, Metroid, and more recently, the awesome Shadow Complex. We’re inspired to deliver something that brings our own voice to the genre.

Choosing the 50s/60s Cold War aesthetic of CounterSpy was driven by a fundamental part of our vision at Dynamighty, which is to build games around themes and settings that we love and have inspired us across movies, TV, music or literature. In this case, there is SO much rich inspiration to geek over from that era: the Bond movies, the classic Mission Impossible TV show, the graphic designs of Saul Bass, the cool mid-century architecture of that era… We love it all and this feeds into our passion that the games we make have a really distinctive, strong visual style.

Although CounterSpy is primarily a single player game, we are working on some interesting ways to let you compete with friends that go a little beyond traditional high scores. We are very eager to talk about more about our cross-platform plans in future updates, including how the PS3 and PS Vita versions can work with the extended gameplay you can get from also downloading and playing on a mobile device. (You know, that ‘device’ you use to post Instagram photos of your cat, tweet your awesome lunch plans, or play those free games that don’t seem to ‘quite’ give you enough gems to get to level 4. It’s OK; we do those things, too!)

From all of us at Dynamighty, thank you for reading! We hope you’ve enjoyed this small taste of what we’ve been working on. We’ll be sharing more as we go, including some of the cool stuff we have planned for the social side of the game. Until we meet again!

For more on CounterSpy, check out Game Informer’s story.