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Game developer Jake Solomon first made a name for himself by helming Firaxis’ revival of XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. In an interview, Solomon told Digital Trends that he has no problem being known as “the XCOM guy,” and he joked that there is a world where he could see himself dying during a playtest of XCOM 17. But after Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Solomon wanted something different.

“Marvel’sMidnight Suns was a very personal game for me to make, but it was very scripted narratively,” Solomon tells Digital Trends. “After that, I wanted to go back to where player narratives are more emergent. Then, I don’t know, maybe it was a midlife crisis, but I got this brain worm, and it was like, ‘what about really, really doubling down on the emergent narrative.'”

That led to the creation of Midsummer Studios, a new Maryland-based developer helmed by Solomon and alumni from Firaxis and The Sims developer Maxis. The team’s first game will be an ambitious life sim that focusues on the choices we make in our daily lives.

• Marvel’s Midnight Suns delayed, moving it out of a busy October

Founding a studio in 2024, a year of turmoil for the video game industry, isn’t an easy feat either. Solomon offered insight into what it will take for his studio to survive and what will make his game stand out.

The start of Midsummer

Despite how Solomon’s departure may have looked after the underperformance of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, he tells Digital Trends he wasn’t forced out of Firaxis. In fact, he’d been thinking about leaving the 2K studio since the summer before Marvel’s Midnight Suns launched in late 2022 and had made a firm decision about doing so by that fall. Solomon tells me that he’d always wanted to make a game about navigating life and relationships.

The desire to make a game about modern life became much more appealing to him than any other project idea. “When I started thinking about how I could do anotherXCOM or Midnight Suns, those just all of a sudden didn’t seem as

Jake Solomon