Cloud Imperium Games, led by legendary game designer Chris Roberts, has opened an office in Santa Monica to help create Roberts’ new space sim game, Star Citizen. The game marks Roberts’ return to the gaming industry and has garnered headlines in the last six months by bringing in more money via crowd funding than any other game to date. Cloud Imperium has raised more than $8.6 million since October of 2012 for the development of Star Citizen.

Roberts is best known for creating the hugely popular Wing Commander line of games in the 1990s. Those games sold millions of units worldwide and led to an animated television series, a feature film, a collectible card game and a series of novels and action figures. With Star Citizen Roberts wants to reinvigorate PC gaming and space sims in particular.

The new office in Santa Monica will be part of a distributed development approach for Star Citizen that spans from Montreal to Austin, Texas to the Los Angeles area. "I’m a big believer in utilizing small, very focused development groups," says Roberts. "Each studio is working on key features of the game. In Santa Monica we’re working on some of the high-end creative elements, the structuring of our game engine and publishing. Other studios are working on technology, game design and production, customer support and web development."