Northern exposure
Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the surrounding area is home to some of the UK’s most productive games studios. James Batchelor takes a closer look at how these companies are working together to grow the region’s talent pool
YOU MIGHT BE surprised by the games being developed in the North East. It’s not just racing games like the Driver series and NASCAR. There are also some triple-A blockbusters and other popular franchises in the works, with local studios contributing to the likes of Watch Dogs, Just Dance, LittleBigPlanet, and EVE Online’s companion shooter Dust 514. In fact, it’s not just games. Developers in
the region have already got their hands on next-gen technology, or are collaborating with other entertainment industries. “Pitbull is working on Unreal Engine 4,”
Top-to-bottom: Julie Dodds (top) from the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative and CCP’s Richard Smith. Main: Representatives of North East developers at the Game Kettle roundtable
declares Carri Cunliffe, director of Secret Sauce and North East developer network Game Kettle. “People don’t realise that they’re doing that in the North East of England. There’s no way you would identify any of the titles developed here as a North East game. They don’t look regional – there’s lots of global IPs.” Atomhawk MD Cumron Ashtiani adds:
“We’ve worked on Driver, Dead Island and Mortal Kombat, but we’ve also helped with Thor: The Dark World and a few other movies – this stuff is being done in the North East. I tell people what we do and they assume we’re working in Soho. They almost do a double- take when we say we’re based in Newcastle.”
26 | NOVEMBER 2013
It’s a collective portfolio as varied as the studios behind it, which range from publisher- owned firms like Ubisoft Reflections to development stalwarts such as Eutechnyx and Pitbull – not to mention hundreds of smaller studios and indies. And the best thing, according to Eutechnyx CEO Darren Jobling, is that this community has grown organically.
I tell people what we do and they assume we’re in Soho. They
do a double-take when we say we’re based in Newcastle.
Cumron Ashtiani, Atomhawk “It’s not been manufactured,” he explains.
“The talent was here first, so all the early companies set up from that. A lot of people presume that it’s a university thing, but in fact it was an entrepreneurial thing.” Perhaps more impressive is the extent to which these North East developers are willing to assist each other.
“Almost all studios now collaborate with other teams in some capacity to fill staffing requirements at different stages of development,” says Joe Stevens, MD at Newcastle-based start-up Whispering Gibbon. “This helps us greatly: we’re able to do
work-for-hire for bigger companies between working on our own IP. We also collaborate with many local companies so that we can fill each other’s skills gaps.” Ashtiani adds: “If someone wins a big
contract, that tends to feed a number of different companies through collaboration or subcontracting. I don’t think you see that so much in any other region – and you certainly didn’t see that ten years ago.” Nosebleed Interactive MD Andreas
Firnigl adds that even the start-ups are brought into the fold: “That ecosystem of the bigger firms supporting the smaller ones is growing. The Hollywood system is bleeding into the games industry, and in the North East it works quite well.”
TALENT SHOW North East studios are also thriving thanks to the near constant supply of promising new recruits. In fact, Jobling reports that more than 30 per cent of Eutechnyx’s team are graduates from Teesside University.
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