After a few unsuccessful dives into the gaming industry, pop culture phenomenon Funko, best known for their unblinking Pop vinyl figures, is trying again with their first triple-A title (though we don’t know its title just yet). At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Funko CEO Andrew Perlmutter made statement regarding the company’s partnership with the newly created 10:10 Games:
Creating iconic products that emotionally connect fans to their favourite fandoms is critical to each product portfolio decision.
As a result, this partnership with 10:10 Games and “utilizing the best creators in the business” will allow Funko to “deliver games that reflect Funko’s unique look and feel across its lines and varied products.” While there’s a lot of cross-promotional pop culture jargon that fills these statements, 10:10 Games seems very well-equipped to handle the “major third-party studio integration” inherent to the AAA Funko game and Funko brand overall.
Leading 10:10 Games, founded just last year, is British developer Jon Burton, founder of Traveller’s Tales and its parent company TT. For those unfamiliar, Traveller’s Tales was founded in 1989 and has been making various action-adventure games since. However, the most notable and most successful of these platformers include the Lego Star Wars series, building upon a relationship with Disney after the development of Mickey Mania in 1994. Though Traveller’s Tales merged with Giant Interactive to create TT in 2005, Burton and Warner Brothers Interactive officially purchased both TT and Traveller’s Tales in 2007, eventually creating the Lego Batman series, for which Burton served as creative director. Though he served as producer for the 2015 war thriller Man Down, Burton’s only recent gaming entry has been Lego Dimensions, also from 2015. Since then, the developer has been attending to a YouTube channel where he teaches tricks of the programming trade, so it’ll be exciting to see how his skills have evolved in the last 7 years.
While the official 10:10 Games Twitter account released a teaser for the title, featuring Funko mascot Freddy Funko celebrating the partnership, not much else has been hinted at regarding gameplay, aside from its status as an “action platformer” – right in Burton’s wheelhouse. With its release slated for 2023 on both PC and consoles, fans won’t have to wait long to see their favorite pop culture figures take the platformer stage. However, if Funko’s past gaming attempts have been any sign, the game might need a bit more than bug-eyed pop culture tie-ins to draw an audience, hopefully containing solid gameplay featuring the signature Funko brand.