The details at the moment are still unclear but it appears TechCrunch has discovered that games veteran Noah Falstein has been hired by Google as their Chief Game Designer. Currently listed on his LinkedIn page as working for “Google”, an earlier cached version mentions “Android Play Studio.”
So many aspects of this news story is intriguing, for starters what is this “Android Play Studio?” Perhaps Google is gearing up to have a full blown gaming department for their mobile OS. So much speculation we could elaborate on such as Google could be setting up a first party developer, or some type of gaming network like Xbox Live but at the moment nothing is confirmed.
Secondly, the actual hiring is also very interesting, Noah Falstein has been around since 1980 in some sort of capacity in gaming. His LinkedIn profile mentions he began at Milton Bradley as a Project Engineer doing work such as:
Developed motor control software for a voice-controlled robot, designed games for the Atari VCS and the unreleased Milton Bradley Home Computer, and did speech recognition research.
He also had a huge role in one of my earliest gaming memories Sinistar. He was the project lead over at William Electronics, and had a fairly big part in having speech in a video game for the very first time.
The problem right now is that, this is all the information we are aware of. Falstein could be working on a number of different things like Google Glass games, Android games, a Android gaming network, it’s really hard to say. Until Google publicly announces what’s going on, we’ll never be sure.
Console software/hardware?
I’m pretty sure its going to happen eventually.