As Neil Young, who started Blueprint mid-2007 and led it for around a year before leaving this spring to head an iPhone gaming company, told me at GDC, Blueprint was intended to be a new way to develop fresh properties across multiple media. In fact, it was originally called Transmedia internally before adopting the name Blueprint.

In addition to its charter to work on new stuff, Blueprint also got ownership of several existing projects at EA, most notably the three games being developed by Steven Spielberg, which makes sense since Neil Young spearheaded that deal. ("Spore" was also under the Blueprint aegis for a short while) It was part of the EA Games label, with Young reporting to label president Frank Gibeau.

It seems there were around a dozen people working on Blueprint and their mission was to change the development process so that individuals or small teams could work together from disparate locations without necessarily being employed at an EA studio. "Using distributed people and leveraging technology in a significant way would allow us to break the high-priced model of game development where everybody is on sight, hired as a full-time regular employee," the former Blueprint staffer told me.