Gardens Interactive（Journey 与 Edith Finch 设计师团队）获超7000万美元投资开发共享世界奇幻游戏

The new game from Journey and What Remains of Edith Finch designer Chris Bell has now secured more than $70 million from leading investment funds.

California-based Gardens Interactive announced on Wednesday that it’s raised over $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing its total to over $70 million.

The round includes Zenith Capital, founded by James Altman (son of the late Zenimax and Bethesda co-founder Robert Altman), Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Bayshore, former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, and others.

Notably, the family office of the late former Nintendo president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, has reinvested in Gardens, having also participated in the 2023 Series A round.

Gardens is led by co-founder and CEO Stephen Bell, a writer who also worked on Journey and What Remains of Edith Finch. The studio’s debut game is a shared-world fantasy adventure, which it describes as a “strandbox.”

Designer Chris Bell said: “Gardens is a game about the stories that emerge when players cross paths and experience chance encounters, set in a shapeshifting world full of myth, mystery and magic. And it doesn’t fit the labels people usually reach for, so we half-jokingly threw one out and it stuck.

“A strandbox is a sandbox where what you do stays behind for whoever passes through next, where the consequences of your actions can be felt by those you may never meet, and where players can deepen their bonds in a multitude of ways.

“Gardens players explore an open and ever-changing world, the kind that pulls you toward the horizon the way The Legend of Zelda does. It’s a world of reverberating memory—you feel the effects of other players’ actions whether they’re standing next to you or passed by days ago.”

Bell said Kojima Productions‘ Death Stranding was a big influence on Gardens, as well as GTA roleplay, Arc Raiders, Peak, and Big Walk. The developer is encouraging fans of those games to sign up for the closed pre-alpha.

Zenith Capital founder James Altman called Gardens’ debit game “something rare” and “an indie studio that will set a new standard for the rest of the industry.”

“Plenty of studios pitch social gameplay, but Gardens is the first where I sat down with a build of the game, and emergent stories wrote themselves,” he said. “Two strangers crossed paths, one of them made a choice, and the world was different for whoever came next.”