The founding of the new Vancouver-based company Timbre Games, as depicted by creative director Geoff Coates. (Geoff Coates image)

The Eugene, Ore.-based video game developer Pipeworks announced on Tuesday that it’s expanded into Canada by opening a new studio in Vancouver.

The new studio, Timbre Games, is headed by Joe Nickolls, former vice president at Electronic Arts and former studio director at the late Capcom Vancouver. Timbre plans to focus on producing action/adventure and simulation titles with what Nickolls describes as “a big push on community-driven content and participation.”

“We couldn’t be more thrilled that Timbre Games is the first of our new studios,” said Lindsay Gupton, CEO of Pipeworks, in a press release. “We’re inspired by the team’s vision and confident they will not only create truly fun games but do so in an inclusive environment where voices are heard and employees thrive.”

Timbre’s other two co-founders are Zoë Curnoe, studio production director, and Geoff Coates, studio creative director. Both are experienced game developers; Curnoe was until very recently the production director on the story campaigns for the Gears of War series, and Coates has worked as a creative director on games such as the SSX series, Company of Heroes 2, and Dead Rising 4.

Coates also serves as the on-staff cartoonist at Timbre, and plans to release a regular comic strip that will satirize the company’s employees (see above).

“The three founding partners [at Timbre] have worked on some of the biggest IP in the world and some of the biggest-selling, too,” Nickolls said to GeekWire. “And we all had fun doing it, so we are ready to do that again!”

“We believe games need to be both fun to play and fun to make,” he continued. “That’s why we got into this business in the first place. We all take having a sense of humor very seriously.”

Timbre launches with an internal diversity initiative that will see its working teams intentionally comprised of equal parts game industry veterans and new talent.

The new company is explicitly a subsidiary of both Pipeworks and the Sheffield, England-based Sumo Group, which acquired Pipeworks in September.

Pipeworks is one of those companies in the games industry that’s been around forever but has still managed to keep a surprisingly low profile. On its own, it’s most notable for developing many licensed games over the course of the sixth and seventh generations of consoles.

However, many other studios have hired Pipeworks over the years to provide support or develop ports of older games. Today, Pipeworks may be best-known for handling the console ports of the best-selling sandbox game Terraria.

The Sumo Group, established in 2003, launched a new company earlier this year, Secret Mode, to focus on finding and publishing smaller video games.

Through its Sumo Digital subsidiary, Sumo also developed the 2021 multiplayer action game Hood: Outlaws & Legends. Sumo Digital in turn has several subsidiaries of its own, the most notable of which is The Chinese Room, which developed the award-winning narrative game Dear Esther in 2012.

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