“Whether we were developing the game for Save the Children or a puppy-killing Evil Mega Corp is irrelevant to me.” Ste Curran, creative director at Zoe Mode, the Brighton-based developer responsible for Chime, is adamant. “I still want to make something that people think is awesome. The aim wasn’t to make a game as a half-hearted thank you to people for donating money to charity. It was to make a game that’s worth every one of your 400 Microsoft Points, with the added warmhearted glow that comes with gaming philanthropy after purchase. Zoe Mode doesn’t do business with corporations that kill puppies, by the way. I’m not sure if that’s company policy or whether we just haven’t found one yet.”

Chime is what happens when you cross the music of classical composer Philip Glass with the blocks of Tetris, the principles of music sequencers and the philanthropic drive of Bob Geldolf. A music-based puzzle game, it’s the flagship title of OneBigGame, the charity project that has commissioned fifteen developers to each create a game and donate the proceeds to worthy causes. The brainchild of Martin De Ronde, co-founder of Killzone’s Guerilla Games, OneBigGame has secured the involvement of developers as diverse as PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura, Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil and Earthworm Jim’s Dave Perry. But it’s fallen to Curran, best known for his role as co-host of Resonance FM’s award-winning videogame radio show, One Life Left, and his team to launch the first game in the project – five years after its inception.

“The idea for Chime predates One Big Game – but when the opportunity to build something for OBG came around it felt like a perfect fit,” Curran tells me. “Because, if nothing else, it gave us some hard deadlines. And yeah, doing things for charity is good. Obviously. But it hasn’t changed the way the game has been handled at all. It’s a full-time project like all the others in the studio, with a team and goals and all the joy / frustration / fast food that comes with that.”

There has to be something in it for Zoe Mode though. Is Chime really a purely philanthropic project for the company? “Zoe’s a business and businesses always need some kind of logical motivation,” Curran explains. “But you can find lots of those that don’t clash with charitable concern. And we’ve donated all of the revenue we’d get from the sales of Chime – we’re not covering our costs here. In terms of personal motivation, and I do not have an ounce of compassion in my cold robot heart so this is simpler: I like the game, I want to see other people play it, and I want to build on it.”

Curran’s playing down of the charitable aspect to Chime could be interpreted as dismissive, but it reflects the wider concern of the OneBigGame project: to base success on the merit of the games released, not on the worthiness of the concept. Contrary to what one might have expected, the clutch of developers involved want to release the very best games they can, as a matter of pride – not to merely create a giveaway experience to thank donors for their 400 MSP. In the case of Chime, the length of the game’s gestation is testament to the ambition.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here