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Jens Matthies is feeling a little flat. It's not that he's unhappy with his lot, or with the work put in by his team at MachineGames, the Swedish studio based in the city of Uppsala that's finishing up on its first ever project, Wolfenstein: The New Order. It's that Matthies' active role on the game is complete, and a journey that's spanned some five years is at last winding towards its conclusion."It feels a little empty when it's all done," says Matthies, who served as an art director at Starbreeze before splintering off with six of his co-workers to found MachineGames. "But it's also something you've been looking forward to for a long time. So it's happy, and it's a little sad at the same time."
Matthies' time at Starbreeze saw happiness tinged with sadness, though not always for the best of reasons. The Stockholm developer built up a reputation for visually stunning, mechanically robust first-person shooters off the back of 2004's The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, a reputation upheld by the stylish, smart comic adaptation The Darkness. Things weren't quite so sweet, however, during an at times turbulent partnership with EA: one project based on the Jason Bourne licence was cancelled outright while another, what would become the 2012 reboot of Syndicate, failed to deliver on its potential.
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