Highlights
- Adobe has once attempted to branch into video game development, one of its former staffers has revealed.
- The company was working on a "large" painting game meant to cater to "people who don't identify as artists."
- The project was greenlit no later than January 2017, but was canceled by August of the following year.
Adobe once wanted to branch into video game development, one of its former employees has revealed. But the company's first game, which was presumably in development for PC, never saw the light of day in the end.
Adobe's Creative Cloud tools have long been a game development staple, with many video game artists being partial to tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Substance 3D to create assets meant to be used in interactive entertainment. Coupled with its AI inroads and diversified R&D efforts, the company managed to insert itself into a wide variety of industries, as underlined by the fact that it presently boasts a $255 billion valuation.
Adobe Was Once Making a Painting Game, Former Staffer Says
Its diversification efforts have once upon a time even reached game development, according to Jonah Lobe, an illustrator who's been at Adobe over a three-year period ending in August 2018, first working as a streaming artist and later as a creative consultant. In a recent interview with Game File's Stephen Totilo, Lobe revealed that his creative consultant position was attached to an unannounced game project. Specifically, Adobe was working on a "painting game" focused on accessibility.
The gist of the idea was to appeal to "people who don't identify as artists and bring creativity to them," Lobe explained, characterizing the project as one of Adobe's market expansion initiatives. The artist said that the conglomerate opted to finance this unconventional undertaking after finding itself utterly dominant in its core markets. According to his LinkedIn profile, this art exploration game was greenlit no later than January 2017. Although its exact scope and budget remain unclear, Lobe described the project as a "large game."
But the undertaking ultimately didn't amount to anything, with Adobe canceling the project the following year. Lobe ultimately left the company in August 2018, having worked on some art tutorials before illustrating the book Marvel Anatomy: A Scientific Study of the Superhuman, which was published in late 2022. He described the Adobe painting game's cancellation as an "emotional blow," which was all the more painful because his previous indie game project, a world-building RPG Fireborne, also failed to ship.
All of this prompted him to leave the gaming space, with the artist saying that he doesn't regret that decision given the current state of the industry, which has been suffering mass layoffs since 2021. Nevertheless, Lobe, who started out as a character artist at Bethesda, still sees video games as a big source of inspiration. That perspective is reflected in his next project, Quiet: Level One, a graphic novel borne out of the idea that the skeletons in Diablo aren't necessarily bad guys. Lobe plans to attempt crowdfunding the novel via Kickstarter in the near future.
