The Provo-based video game company, founded in 2005 by brothers Geremy and Donald Mustard, is determined to maintain creative, and therefore financial, control of its intellectual property. The standard mold in video game distribution, as well as other forms of media, is to sell the rights of a product or idea to a company that will then distribute and market it.

Long before Radiohead bucked that trend in the music world by releasing its new album directly to the consumer, Chair knew it wanted to participate in a similar "great experiment."

"We want to build our own franchise," Donald Mustard explained in a visit to Chair's studio. "You have an opportunity to expand [a product], but you don't own the rights. And publishers own something they don't know. If the process were more unified the result would be better products. We want to control our destiny."

Mustard doesn't say it directly, but creating his own game studio was in part born out of frustrations encountered while creating his previous game, "Advent Rising." Big branching plans were in line for that title as well, only to run into middling sales and a publisher uninterested in pursuing the brand.

In the long run, independence at Chair means an ambitious effort to build a franchise based on the already released novel Empire by speculative fiction author Orson Scott Card. The book, a futuristic thriller about a politically driven civil war in America, was pitched to Card by Mustard as the seed of a franchise that would eventually grow to include comic books, a movie and, of course, video games.

The movie deal already has a big-name producer - Joel Silver of "The Matrix" - and Chair is working on designing the game.

In the meantime ("Empire" the game will appear in late 2008 at the earliest), Chair's first game, an underwater action shooter called "Undertow," will debut Nov. 21 as a $10 downloadable title on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade.

"Xbox Live offers budgets we can manage ourselves," said Laura Heeb, Chair's publicist. "Without it, we wouldn't know what to do with an idea like 'Undertow,' " because it's an idea that doesn't lend itself to a high-standard $60 title, whose budgets generally start around $15 million. The game took a relatively speedy 10 months from conception to release.

Despite the lower budget, Mustard is jazzed about "Undertow," no more evident than when playing the game with him. "Go over here." "We need to take this base." "Get that guy! Get that guy!" It's no surprise he later says, "I can't believe they pay me to do this job."

"Undertow" also offers an Xbox Live first: up to 16 players at one time, battling it out for underwater supremacy. And it's one of the few downloadable titles to use the beefy Unreal III Engine, the same used for AAA-titles such as "Bioshock." "This is high-quality, cool, fun and not dumbed-down by focus testing."

The ability to be ''iterative''(the ability to try several approaches to one idea) is a direct result of the studio's independence. This is best illustrated by Chair's motion capture equipment. While it is unusual that the relatively small studio (eight employees) would have such expensive equipment at all, it comes in handy when trying to figure out how to best simulate swimming for "Undertow."

"There's room to experiment," Mustard said, indicating the heavy-duty hooks and harness used to support the motion-capture actors. "You can make prototypes fast and continue to reiterate until you get it right."