Former Treyarch studio co-head and Black Ops 3 director is heading up a new first-party PlayStation studio
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Five years after leaving Treyarch, former studio co-chief and Call of Duty producer Jason Blundell is heading up a new first-party PlayStation Studio called Dark Outlaw Games.
"Dark Outlaw Games have been working away in the shadows for a while, and when we've got something to talk about we'll step out into the light," Blundell said in an interview with Jeff Gerstmann. "But the story for me is about the game, not about the studio. So the reason why we're not doing a fanfare or shouting about it from the rooftops is, let's get something, right?
"It's such a privilege to be able to do it with Sony as a new first-party studio. Sony doesn't set up first-party studios all the time. To have that privilege is humbling, it's really nice. I'm really excited."
Blundell said Dark Outlaw has been "staffing up [and] keeping it kind of low key" to this point, but declined to say anything specific about the studio's current status, much less what it's working on. "We're getting the team to jell, getting the ideas clicking—I'm a programmer at heart, so let's test those assumptions: Is it working, is it working? You're trying to hit that escape velocity."
Blundell has a long list of credits to his name, beginning—just as he said—as a programmer on Starlancer in 2000. But he's best known for a long run on Call of Duty at Treyarch: He served as producer on Call of Duty 3 and Black Ops, directed two Zombies maps for Black Ops 2, and directed both the campaign and Zombies modes for Black Ops 3. He left Treyarch in 2020 after 13 years at the studio, saying his time at the studio "has been nothing short of awesome."
This isn't Blundell's first comeback: In 2021 he launched a new studio alongside fellow Call of Duty veteran Dave Anthony in 2021 called Deviation Games. Interestingly, that studio's first project was being developed in partnership with Sony, but Blundell left Deviation just over a year later, in September 2022, and the studio closed in 2024 without releasing a game.
Apparently that unhappy outcome hasn't diminished his enthusiasm. "It's very exciting," Blundell said in the interview. "I love the fact that still at this point in my career, I'm given these opportunities. It's always that desire to—again, you want to put that one extra disc on the wall, if you will, and can we bring something to an audience and excite them and get some new IPs ... that makes me jump out of bed every morning."
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