Shahid Ahmad, PlayStation’s Top Indie Person, Leaving To Make Games Again, Here’s Why

Have you been enjoying your PlayStation indies through the years? You may be interested in this coming piece of news.

Shahid Ahmad, who has been working with indies for PlayStation for the past three years, is leaving his post to get back into game development. This follows Dan Adelman also leaving his post as indie contact person and ambassador for Nintendo. While Adelman kept his plans to promote games close to his chest, Ahmad hasn’t kept his plans a secret.

In a new blog post, Ahmad assured PlayStation fans that the Strategic Content team he led will continue to pursue indie games for PlayStation platforms. On his end, Ahmad expressed a desire to get back into game development, seeing how the scene has changed so much.

For Ahmad, there’s only one game on his mind, and it’s the one game he seems to remember most fondly from his days at PSI Interactive; Chimera. Chimera is an arcade style isometric game published on the ZX Spectrum in 1985.

Ahmad has actually been working on remaking Chimera as a side project for some time now. As he explained it last year, he felt the desire not to use tools like GameMaker, but code it from the ground up for modern platforms.

Many fans noticed his tweets about bringing Chimera to Vita, but there may have been a different platform that prodded him to go indie himself: VR. In his own words:

If I do remake Chimera, I’m now giving serious consideration to making it VR only. That’s how sold I am on VR. Totally transformative.

— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) September 24, 2015

As of recently, Ahmad has been working on Chimera on Unity, presumably so it will work on multiple VR platforms and not just PlayStation VR. If you’re reading this Ahmad, thank you for everything you’ve done for PlayStation indies, and we look forward to seeing what you do with Chimera from here on out.