ngmoco founder Neil Young 

On June 18th, Level Up broke the news that EA Blueprint boss Neil Young was leaving Electronic Arts to launch his own company. Last Friday, we caught up with Young by phone to procure some additional details about his venture, named ngmoco. The "affable Brit," as we described young in our previous post, was happy to spill some of the beans, while keeping others secret for later. Here's what we learned, presented in our handy Just the FAQs format.

What the heck is ngmoco?

It stands for Next-Generation Mobile Company.

I repeat: what the heck is ngmoco?

Young plans to focus on developing and publishing games for iPhone class mobile devices.

That's it?

No, there's more. "I want ngmoco to feel like 1st party for the iPhone," says Young. "I want customers to feel like there's somebody out there that's building games, that's financing games, that's helping games get made that take advantage of what the device does really well, and gets beyond porting a PSP game or a DS game. Young cites Nintendo as a lodestar for the way the Japanese developer-publisher has built games like Nintendogs, Brain Age and Zelda that show off what the DS is best at. "The iPhone is a unique device, right? It has a camera in it. It will be a 3G phone. It will have GPS. It has a touch screen. It has accelerometers. It's got good graphics performance. It's got all your media on there. My instinct is, the type of games that will make people want to buy more iPhones or more devices of that class are the types of things that really showcase the capabilities and bring what we know as game designers together with what Apple has delivered as a platform to create compelling and exciting new experiences."

Where did the inspiration for this come from?

"I stood in line for the iPhone at the Apple Store in Santa Monica in the baking sun with my kids, my girlfriend and some of my friends," Young says. "What I realized when I got the phone and got over the initial learning curve...I just found myself spending much, much more time interacting with the device and using it in a way that I'd never used a cell phone before."

As he began using his iPhone for browsing, maps, photography, music and video, Young retired all of his other portable devices with the exception of his Nintendo DS. "I started thinking, 'Okay, I'm traveling, I've got my iPhone in my pocket that does pretty much everything, and I've got my DS in my backpack to service my gaming needs. What's the opportunity to bring those things together?'"

Was that brainstorm all it took to get him to leave EA?

There was a second major factor: Apple's announcement of the applications store for the iPhone. "It was really at that moment that I said to myself, 'Ok. There is a great opportunity hear to connect a whole bunch of the learning that I've had at Electronic Arts; the things that I've built that have been on the elading edge of gaming; and build something that will service what feels like an inevitable need to me: the real validation of the mobile games business."

The mobile games business needs validating? Really? There's DS. There's PSP. There's Gameloft, Glu, EA Mobile and more. What's he on about?

What Young is talking about is connected mobile gaming, which has been held back on handheld consoles like DS and PSP by the lack of persistent connectivity, and has also been stifled on mobile phones by the carriers' strict control over the distribution and presentation of mobile games--to say nothing of the plethora of handsets that developers must support. "There hasn't really been an appealing landscape to do creative things, or for creative things to have a business built around them. So it was really the announcement of the launch of the App Store and the SDK [software development kit] that made me feel like I can create a super-great business that provides some leadership in this space."

Yeah, but wasn't this the kind of stuff that Young was supposed to be doing at EA Blueprint? Why couldn't he have done this at EA?

"I could have tackled this inside Electronic Arts," says Young. "You know, N'Gai, I love EA. I grew up at EA. I really understand how to work inside the company. I've got a lot of great friends and a great deal of respect for everything the company did. The pure fact of the matter is, when you're inside a large company, you have a lot of responsibilities. This felt like something that required an extreme level of focus. It required me to go after the challenge very, very quickly and very, very aggressively. That level of focus and attention really warrants entrepreneurial focus. And of course, what comes along with entrepreneurial focus, hopefully, is entrepreneurial upside as well. That's obviously a piece of the puzzle."

Is Mini-Neil Alan Yu joining Young at ngmoco?

We put this question to Young, but were told that no announcements were being made regarding personnel at this time.

Where's the money coming from?