By Neil Vidyarthi on August 17, 2010 1:20 PM

Zynga Boston is Born Through Acquisition of Social Music Gamers Conduit Labs

conduitlogo[1] Zynga, on a roll with their latest investments from Google, their appointment of Owen Van Natta as EVP of Business, their announcement to distribute across Yahoo and more, have acquired Boston’s Conduit Labs social games company. We covered Conduit Labs many times in the past, as they created awesome music games like Music Pets and LoudCrowd. The Conduit Labs will become Zynga Boston, and the studio will focus on product development. Conduit’s CEO becomes the head of the studio, and it looks like Zynga’s acquisition methods have grown into a template, as the acquisition is reminiscent of their acquisition of Challenge Games (now Zynga Austin).

Conduit Labs has been an exciting company to the Social Times team for a while, as we’ve seen them grow from the makers of a simple Facebook Game, Music Pets (check out our review here), to getting a deal with Universal music to provide real tracks into their more ambitious music game, LoudCrowd. This means that Zynga now has a working relationship with Universal Music as well, and we could see more ambitious music games coming down the pipe.

Conduit Labs’ CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, will become head of the new Boston studio. The rest of the team will be part of Zynga, and Zynga was excited about the move to Boston:

“Boston is an epicenter for technology and has a strong talent market, making it an ideal location for us to expand operations,” said Mike Verdu, senior vice president of games at Zynga. “As one of the most prominent social game companies in Boston, the Conduit team shares a similar culture and drive with Zynga, and together we anticipate great successes from our new studio.”