Google Inc. is working on a social gaming startup looking to debut its first game as early as summer, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Called simply “Arcade,” the startup is being headed by 21-year-old boy-genius Michael Sayman, best known for joining Facebook at the age of 17 and designing the Lifestage app. Sayman later joined Google, initially working as a product manager on Google Assistant before switching to Area 120, an area within the search giant dedicated to developing new ideas.

Google has confirmed the existence of Arcade, telling Bloomberg that it was “focused on mobile gaming with friends” that is “a very early experiment so there aren’t many details to share right now.”

Arcade’s first game is believed to be a quiz-style game, possibly attempting to cash in on the quiz craze driven by HQ Trivia and similar games. It apparently will differentiate itself by having no tie-in with existing social networks, so users will create accounts using their phone numbers.

While that may sound strange, given Google’s evident interest in tying people into a company account, the report claims that Google’s agenda may be to create gaming products that could evolve into a separate social network by themselves.

Given Google’s previous failed attempts to develop a popular social network — most recently Google Plus but before that Orkut, Dodgeball, Latitude, Google Lively and Google Buzz — a seemingly out-there concept of separating a Google account from a new Google-owned social gaming service is certainly worth a shot. Using phone numbers as the tie-in to an account also isn’t a new idea, and today is still the primary login used for the Facebook Inc.-owned WhatsApp messaging app, which has 1.5 billion users.

Putting aside the social networking aspect, Google also has a checkered if limited history when it comes to gaming development. Niantic Inc. was founded in 2010 as an internal startup within Google, but a lack of interest and support saw it spun off in 2015 at the same time Google became a division under new parent company Alphabet Inc. The following year, independent of Google’s strings, Niantic released Pokemon Go, the world’s first hit augmented reality game, one that still brings millions into the company today.

Photo: goodrob13/Flickr