Jason Blundell wants to make you care about the people you’re shooting with — not just the things you’re shooting at.
The veteran game designer, best known for shaping Call of Duty’s beloved Zombies mode into a cultural phenomenon across more than a decade at Treyarch, has officially unveiled his new independent studio: Magic Fractal. Based in Orange County, California, the company is already at work on an unannounced cooperative shooter that Blundell says will prioritize narrative depth and social connection in ways the genre has rarely attempted. It’s a bold pitch. And it comes at a moment when the games industry is simultaneously contracting through mass layoffs and expanding through a wave of new studio formations led by seasoned creators striking out on their own.
The announcement, first reported by Engadget, marks the second time Blundell has tried to build something from scratch since leaving Activision Blizzard. His first post-Call of Duty venture was Deviation Games, a studio he co-founded in 2021 with fellow Treyarch alumnus Dave Anthony. That company secured a deal with Sony to develop a new PlayStation IP, attracted significant industry talent, and appeared well-positioned. Then it collapsed. Deviation Games shut down in early 2024 without ever shipping a product, a casualty of the brutal economic recalibration that swept through the gaming business.
Blundell isn’t dwelling on that chapter. In a video posted to Magic Fractal’s newly launched social channels, he spoke directly to fans with the kind of casual intensity that made him a recognizable figure during Call of Duty’s promotional cycles. “We are building a cooperative shooter that puts story first, and creates moments that bring people together,” he said. The language is deliberate. Blundell has spent his career studying how groups of players bond under pressure — how shared adversity in a fictional scenario generates real emotional connections. Zombies wasn’t just a horde mode. At its peak, it was a social ritual, complete with its own mythology, Easter eggs layered deep enough to sustain years of community investigation, and a storytelling ambition that often exceeded what the main Call of Duty campaigns attempted.
Magic Fractal’s founding team reflects that ambition. The studio has assembled a roster of developers with credits spanning some of the most commercially successful franchises in gaming. According to details shared alongside the announcement, the team includes veterans from Call of Duty, Halo, Destiny, and World of Warcraft — franchises that collectively represent hundreds of millions of players and billions of dollars in revenue. The specific names beyond Blundell haven’t been fully disclosed, but the pedigree alone signals that Magic Fractal intends to compete at the highest tier of multiplayer game development.
No publisher has been announced. No platform commitments. No release window. That’s not unusual for a studio at this stage, but it does raise questions about funding. The games industry’s venture capital environment has cooled considerably since the speculative highs of 2021 and 2022, when investors poured money into gaming startups at a pace that now looks reckless. Studios founded during that period — Deviation Games among them — often burned through capital before reaching production milestones that could justify continued investment. Blundell will need to convince backers that Magic Fractal can avoid the same fate.
His track record gives him credibility. During his tenure at Treyarch, Blundell served as director on some of the most critically and commercially successful entries in the Call of Duty Zombies lineage, including the narratively ambitious arcs in Black Ops III and Black Ops 4. He understood something that many competitive multiplayer designers overlook: players don’t just want mechanical challenges. They want stories to tell each other afterward. The best Zombies maps — Origins, Der Eisendrache, Shadows of Evil — functioned as elaborate puzzle boxes wrapped in shooter mechanics, demanding communication and coordination that turned strangers into collaborators.
That philosophy appears central to Magic Fractal’s pitch. The cooperative shooter market is crowded but, arguably, underserved in exactly the area Blundell is targeting. Games like Helldivers 2 have demonstrated massive appetite for cooperative play, selling tens of millions of copies by emphasizing teamwork and shared chaos. But narrative-driven co-op remains a niche that few studios have cracked at scale. Left 4 Dead did it through environmental storytelling. The Destiny franchise has tried through raid mechanics and lore. Nobody has fully merged deep, character-driven narrative with the kind of accessible co-op gunplay that attracts mainstream audiences.
That’s the gap Blundell appears to be aiming for.
The timing of the announcement is also notable in the context of broader industry trends. The first half of 2025 has seen a continuation of the layoffs and studio closures that defined 2024. Microsoft shut down Tango Gameworks and other studios. Sony closed Firewalk Studios after the disastrous launch of Concord. Riot Games, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft have all reduced headcount. And yet, simultaneously, experienced developers have been forming new independent studios at a remarkable clip. The logic is straightforward: large publishers are risk-averse and bureaucratic, and top-tier talent increasingly believes it can build better products with smaller, more focused teams unencumbered by corporate overhead.
Blundell’s decision to try again after Deviation’s failure speaks to that conviction. It also speaks to something more personal. In the announcement video, he didn’t reference Deviation directly, but the subtext was clear. He’s been through the worst-case scenario. He watched a studio die. And he’s choosing to build again anyway, this time presumably with lessons learned about burn rate, scope management, and the perils of pre-production limbo.
The name itself — Magic Fractal — carries a hint of Blundell’s design philosophy. Fractals are patterns that repeat at every scale, complex structures generated from simple rules. It’s a fitting metaphor for the kind of game design that made Zombies compelling: simple inputs (shoot, survive, cooperate) generating endlessly complex social and narrative outcomes. Whether the name is a conscious statement of design intent or just something that sounded good in a brainstorm, it aligns with Blundell’s public statements about creating systems that produce emergent stories.
The co-op shooter space will only get more competitive. Bungie is attempting to reinvent itself after Destiny 2’s struggles. New entries from established and independent studios are in various stages of development. And the live-service model that dominated the last decade of multiplayer gaming is showing cracks, with players increasingly resistant to aggressive monetization and content treadmills. A studio that can offer a genuinely fresh approach — particularly one rooted in storytelling rather than just mechanical novelty — could find a receptive audience.
But the road from announcement to shipped product is littered with wreckage. For every successful new studio, a dozen fail before releasing anything. Blundell knows this better than most. The question isn’t whether he has the talent or the vision. It’s whether Magic Fractal can secure the funding, maintain the discipline, and execute at a level that matches the ambition. The games industry loves a comeback story. It also has a short memory and an unforgiving market.
Jason Blundell is betting he can beat those odds. Again.
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