Veteran Game Developer Manveer Heir announced via Medium this week that he and other industry veterans have come together to form Brass Lion Entertainment, a new multi-platform entertainment company that will aim to create “video games, film, TV, comics, novels, podcasts, and other forms of media.” According to Heir’s announcement, Brass Lion Entertainment is something that Heir has been working towards since 2017. The studio is aiming to be “diverse and inclusive” by focusing on “creating original fictional universes that center on Black and Brown characters, cultures and stories.”
Heir and the rest of the team at Brass Lion Entertainment believe that the landscape of video games and today’s popular media in general is “sorely lacking” in cultural diversity. Heir, along with Bryna Dabby Smith and Rashad Redic, founded their company to unite their “creative experience” together to create original content that is more representative of more demographics, by people from those underrepresented groups. Smith previously worked on Square Enix’s Sleeping Dogs, and Redic is a former Bethesda developer who contributed to Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Heir previously worked on Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect Andromeda, and 2009’s Wolfenstein.
First up for Brass Lion Entertainment is the announcement of its new video game, a creative “universe” titled Corner Wolves. Heir writes: “Corner Wolves is a fictional universe set in Harlem in the mid-90s, where Jacinte, a young Afro-Latina, embarks on a mission to find her father’s killer. Corner Wolves tells the stories of young people growing up in the hood, and how their lives are shaped and defined by the war on drugs, as they are caught between dope dealers, hustlers, and overzealous police.”
Brass Lion Entertainment planned for Corner Wolves to be an “interactive project” but quickly saw its scope expand. “[It] became apparent that the universe we were creating had legs outside of interactive also, and so we are going to be bringing the universe to multiple media, both linear and interactive,” Heir explains in the announcement. Perhaps the game portion of Corner Wolves will expand to comics, novels, or other media.
Brass Lion Entertainment is taking their commitment to diversification and inclusive creative serious, and is bringing in the big guns to work on Corner Wolves. Writer and journalist Evan Narcisse, who co-wrote the Rise of the Black Panther comic series with Ta-Nehisi Coates, will be crafting the game’s story, and the music supervision will fall to the infamous Just Blaze, who has a storied career working with artists like Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyonce.
No word yet on what kind of game Corner Wolves will be, what platforms it will be playable on, or when to expect a release. With the high level of New York-native talent on board for Corner Wolves, as well as the team’s top level development experience, there’s a high probability that Brass Lion Entertainment will be able to succeed in their mission to produce top quality entertainment that tells a wider variety of stories that speak to a wide variety of people.