Jay Cohen running Jerry Bruckheimer's video game company

Jay Cohen is taking over Jerry Bruckheimer and MTV's video game joint venture in hopes of kicking the year-old but still nascent operation into high gear.

As reported last week, the former senior VP of publishing at Ubisoft left unexpectedly with indications he would be working with a more traditional entertainment company here in L.A.

Now numerous sources have confirmed that the Cohen's new employer is the game studio formed by MTV Games and Jerry Bruckheimer Films (the company behind some little franchises like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "CSI").

The hiring answers the 15 month-old question of what exactly is going on at the company, which launched in December of 2007 as a way for Bruckheimer to bring his brand to a new medium and MTV to expand its slate beyond "Rock Band."

Since then, radio silence. No announcements of projects in the works and not even rumors here in Hollywood about stuff going on.

But it looks like Bruckheimer is finally ready to get things going. As I reported when Cohen left Ubi, he's one of the top decision makers in American videogame publishing, so he certainly has all the connections and experience necessary to work with developers and make AAA titles.

Neither Bruckheimer nor MTV have commented (yet), so there's no indication of what the next steps will be (more hirings? deals with developers? titles getting the green light?). At the time the mega-producer made his deal with the cable conglomerate, he indicated he wouldn't be making games based on his movies and TV shows (since the rights for those are mostly owned by the studios), but rather looking to do original stuff. The plan is that just as Bruckheimer's name means something in movies and TV, it can do the same for video games.

If successful, it would be a first, since no individual or company has really cracked the nut of being a "producer" for video games the way people regularly produce movies and TV shows (i.e. sheparding development and production without being an employee of the studio/publisher). Now it's up to Jay Cohen to see if it's possible.