Oud Rare medewerker voegt zich bij Playtonic

Playtonic Games bestaat uit bijna alleen maar oud Rare medewerkers en de nieuwste toevoeging aan het team is geen uitzondering.

Kevin Bayliss, één van de eerste werknemers bij Rare. Hij was daar de Graphics Director en zijn bekendste werk is misschien wel het moderne uiterlijk van Donkey Kong en het ontwerp van Diddy Kong. Volgens het blogbericht van Playtonic is hij al een tijdje bezig bij Playtonic, maar is hij vanaf vandaag officieel een lid van het Playtonic team . Hieronder lees je wat de motivatie van Kevin was om bij Playtonic te gaan werken.

After working at Rare for nearly 20 years (since the 80s!) it was nice to be able to take a break from games when I eventually left in 2005. I’ve worked on a few music and art projects since then, but I also missed being part of a video game team.

The timing with Playtonic was perfect. After meeting up with the team last year it became obvious to me that this was something I had to be a part of. I hadn’t seen some of the Playtonic team for almost a decade, but the environment and dynamic they’d recreated at the studio felt as though I’d been transported back to the 90s – in a good way!

For the past six months I’ve been travelling up and down the country to spend a couple of days a week with the team, but now I’m in the process of re-locating to work fulltime at Playtonic. This year my wife and I are moving much nearer to where the studio is located, and it’ll take me 15 minutes to get into work, rather than two hours. So that means more graphics, and speedier development time!

To date I’ve really enjoyed contributing characters to Yooka-Laylee and working within the office environment. So far I’ve built a variety of silly characters for the game, from concept sketch right through to the final models and animation. I had to spend a bit of time getting back up to scratch with technology, but thankfully a few months of nagging the other artists sorted that!

In the future I’d love to rekindle some of the ideas I’ve had since leaving Rare, and help bring to life some of those even bigger, bolder character concepts that have been brewing in my head. I’ve so many ideas, old and new, so it’s going to be great fun filling that little logo-flask with more stars.

In short, it’s like old times, but new! There are fantastic group of people here and we all have the same ambitions. I’m very pleased and feel very lucky to be connected to the company now, and really excited about the future!