Tippett Studio and HappyGiant are using handcrafted monsters in HoloGrid: Monster Battle.
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Star Wars Holochess inspires this gorgeous blend of card and monsters

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

For 30 years, Phil Tippett has been creating monsters for the movies, including the memorable Holochess game in the original Star Wars film. And now he’s made the monsters for a new augmented reality mobile game, HoloGrid: Monster Battle.

I traveled to Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, yesterday to view a demo, which is unlike anything I’ve seen before. It is a hybrid of a board game, a collectible card game, a mobile game, and an augmented reality game — all in one. The game from HappyGiant features monsters designed by Tippett himself, a two-time Academy Award winner for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.