Nonprofit selling new XBLA game Chime for charity

by Alex Wawro
November 03, 2009 13:48 PM PST

OneBigGame's first project comes to XBox Live Arcade this winter, and all proceeds are donated to children's charities.

Nonprofit publisher OneBigGame recently announced their first game, a rhythm-based Xbox Live Arcade puzzle game called Chime. Featuring music from artists like Philip Glass and Moby, the title was created pro bono by development house Zoe Mode and will be available for purchase before the end of the year.

Nonprofit dev selling new game Chime for charity

OneBigGame develops small, low-overhead games and donates the revenue to charity.

For those unfamiliar with the project, OneBigGames is a certified public benefit organization formed in 2007 by Martin de Ronde, known for his involvement with Guerrilla Games (the developers of Killzone.) The company works to partner with willing game developers on short-term donation-driven game projects intended to raise funds for charity partners like Save the Children and the Starlight Children's Foundation.

"OneBigGame is basically a global platform that will allow game developers to use their creative resources to do something good for the world," said de Ronde when the company went public two years ago.

In addition to the upcoming Chime, OneBigGame has announced development on a number of charity games with designers like Dave Perry (developer of games like Earthworm Jim,) Masaya Matsuura (of Parappa the Rappa fame) and Charles Cecil, known for his work on the Broken Sword games.

<>"These developers and designers can just go out and come up with something that has no commercial constraint, something they've always wanted to create, is relatively easy to create in a couple months' time -- that's the whole idea," explained de Ronde in an upcoming Gamasutra interview. "Come play a game by your favorite game designer and, hey, by doing so, you're also generating money for charity."