NaturalMotion Games Founding New London Mobile Dev Studio

NaturalMotion Games, the game creation arm of animation software developer NaturalMotion, said Monday it is establishing a new studio in London to "accelerate" development of iPhone and Android games. The company formed the new games division last year, and has released the iOS games Jenga, Backbreaker and Backbreaker 2: Vengeance. New games coming out of the London games studio will include ones based on new intellectual properties "with a focus on socially connected gameplay," the company said. CEO Torsten Reil said in a statement, "Our talented team in Oxford has already had great success with Backbreaker and Jenga but with the studio now working on more projects at full capacity, this is an ideal opportunity to tap into the pool of creative development talent available in London." NaturalMotion, which already has offices in San Francisco, CA and Oxford, England, was founded in 2001, specializing in animation software such as Morpheme, Endorphin and Euphoria. The company continues to support its animation software business. Its technology is found in games including Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Black Rock's Pure and the upcoming Firefall MMO from Red 5, among others. The latest release of NaturalMotion's Morpheme animation middleware, version 3.0, released last year, and supports Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move controller inputs.