A San Diego game studio that decided the interesting question wasn't which games get made - it was who gets to make them.
The founders in one frame: a game designer who has shipped AAA titles, a 25-year online-games operator, a three-time NBA champion, and a former Obama aide. Nobody in the room looked like they belonged in the same startup. That was rather the point.
Here is a thing about the video game industry that everyone knows and nobody quite fixes: it reaches billions of people and is made by a comparatively narrow slice of them. Games are a $200-billion business, they are the default culture for a couple of generations, and the pipeline of people who build them - and the templates for what "a game" is supposed to feel like - remain stubbornly familiar. You can treat that as a moral problem, a market problem, or both. HiDef, Inc. was founded in 2019 on the theory that it is both, and that the second one is how you fund the first.
HiDef is a mobile game studio in San Diego. It was co-founded by four people who, on paper, have almost nothing in common: Jace Hall, a game designer and publisher who has shipped AAA titles; Anthony Castoro, who spent 25 years building and operating online games at places like EA Mobile, Codemasters and Daybreak; Rick Fox, who won three NBA championships before deciding his next act would be business development at a game company; and Dr. David Washington, a former aide to President Obama who advises the musician Alicia Keys on philanthropy and now carries the title Chief Impact Officer. The interesting thing about that last title is that it is a founder title. Plenty of companies bolt "impact" on later, as a department, once the product exists. HiDef put it in the founding cap table.
The pitch, roughly, is this. Most games are built around winning - around combat, competition, someone losing so you can climb. HiDef's bet is that a very large audience would rather create than conquer: express themselves, make things, be seen, discover each other's stuff. Build for that audience, on modern mobile technology, and you get games that happen to be more welcoming to more people - as players and, eventually, as makers. It is a mission statement that is also, conveniently, a total addressable market.
"There are over 1 billion Bitmoji avatars just waiting to dance."— Chip Lange, CEO, HiDef
A game-industry visionary who has designed and published numerous successful AAA titles. At HiDef he owns the creative direction - the "what should this even feel like" problem.
25-plus years building and operating some of the world's most successful online games, at EA Mobile, Codemasters, Heatwave Interactive and Daybreak Games. The operator of the group.
A three-time NBA champion and former team captain for the Boston Celtics and LA Lakers, with a long second career in entertainment and esports. Handles the deals.
A former aide to President Obama who advises 15-time GRAMMY winner Alicia Keys on philanthropy and policy. Proof that the "impact" in the mission is staffed, not decorative.
In 2021 the company brought in Chip Lange as CEO and President. Lange's career began in 1991 at Electronic Arts, where he ran Pogo and the casual mobile studios among other roles - which is to say HiDef paired an unconventional founding team with a very conventional, very deep operating executive. That combination is the whole idea.
A genre-defining mobile title built on Unity's real-time 3D platform, designed to put users of all ages at the creative center of its daily programming. The premise: players aren't just consuming content, they're the content - creative expression, shared experiences and cultural discovery rather than another combat loop.
Announced in 2022 with Snap Inc.: a standalone, off-platform social game that turns Snapchat's Bitmoji avatars into dancers, using Snap's AR technology. The strategy is refreshingly blunt - build for an audience that already exists. Over a billion Bitmoji have been created; Snapchat reaches hundreds of millions. HiDef just needed a dance floor.
HiDef is a small company - roughly eleven people - which raises an obvious question: how does a small studio ship ambitious social games without a thousand engineers? The answer, so far, is partnerships that do specific jobs. Unity supplies the technology, so HiDef doesn't have to build a real-time 3D engine from scratch. Snap supplies the audience and the AR plumbing, so HiDef doesn't have to acquire a hundred million users cold. You bring the game design and the mission; you rent the parts of the stack that are already solved. It is not a glamorous strategy, but for an eleven-person studio it is close to the only rational one.
The money, meanwhile, is modest by industry standards and pointed by design. HiDef launched publicly in March 2021 with more than $9 million in funding, anchored by a $7.5 million Series A led by Wick Capital Partners. That is enough to build and prove a thesis; it is not enough to brute-force a hit. So the company's choices - a creativity-first flagship, a partnership-led go-to-market, a founding impact officer - are less like a big studio's bets and more like an argument. The argument is that games built to include more people are also a good business, and that you don't have to choose. Whether the market agrees is the part nobody gets to skip.
What's genuinely unusual here isn't the technology or even the funding. It's the org chart. Most game studios optimize for shipping; HiDef built a founding team optimized for a worldview, then hired an EA veteran to make it ship. If it works, the interesting lesson won't be "hire an NBA champion." It'll be that who you put in the founding room shapes what the product is allowed to become.
"Games have already captured the interest of 300 million Snapchatters - we're excited to team up with HiDef on this music and dance game."— Pany Haritatos, Head of Snap Games
Interactive-entertainment veterans and a social-impact leader come together to build inclusive, creativity-first gaming experiences.
The company unveils itself with a $7.5M Series A led by Wick Capital Partners and installs Chip Lange as CEO and President.
HiDef partners with Unity and hires a team of industry leaders to bring its flagship real-time 3D mobile game to market.
HiDef teams with Snap Inc. to co-develop a Bitmoji-based dance and music social game, targeted for release the following year.
HiDef is a San Diego mobile game studio building social, creativity-focused games - including a Unity-powered flagship title and a Bitmoji dance game with Snap - with a mission of positive social impact and inclusion.
It was co-founded in 2019 by game designer Jace Hall, industry operator Anthony Castoro, three-time NBA champion Rick Fox, and former Obama aide Dr. David Washington. Chip Lange later joined as CEO.
HiDef has raised more than $9M, including a $7.5M Series A led by Wick Capital Partners, announced in March 2021.
In 2022 HiDef partnered with Snap Inc. to develop a standalone Bitmoji-based dance and music social game using Snapchat's avatar ecosystem and AR technology.
HiDef, Inc. is headquartered in San Diego, California, and operates as a remote-friendly team of roughly 11 people.