Schell Games

Schell Games is an American video game development studio based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The studio was founded by Jesse Schell in 2002, a former Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. Schell Games specializes in Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) experiences, developing games for both education and entertainment.^[1] Partnering with Disney, Lucasfilm, and Lenovo, Schell Games were the lead game developer for 2017's Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, working closely with Caleb Arseneaux, a Managing Producer at Disney at the time who served as managing producer for the project, while Lenovo developed the associated hardware.^[2]

Schell Games continued working on the game post-launch, developing three major expansions: The "The Last Jedi Update,"^[3] the "Holochess Update,"^[4] and the "Dark Side Expansion."^[5] Employees at Schell Games have stated that they and Caleb Arseneaux were only given a brief and strictly controlled glimpse of early footage showcasing the climactic fight featuring the Elite Praetorian Guard in The Last Jedi, and were then forced to recreate their fighting style from memory for the "Epic Combat Challenge" in the The Last Jedi Update. The team was frustratingly forced to choose the Praetorian Guards as the final encounter as there were no other qualified enemy combatants featured in the film that were not already in the game.^[2]

At the 2018 Webby Awards, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges earned Schell Games and their partners awards in four categories, including the "Official categories" of "Technical Achievement" and "Best Use of Augmented Reality," as well as the "People's Voice categories" of "Technical Achievement" and "Best Use of Augmented Reality."^[6] The game was eventually retired on June 1, 2022, with no future content in the works, support ending completely only a month later on July 6.^[7]