Hello! I am the Art Manager with FreeStyleGames and you may have heard that we’ve been pouring our hearts into making the excellent Guitar Hero Live, an exciting reinvention for the iconic game. If you haven’t played it yet, stop reading this and head over to Guitarhero.com and sort yourself out.
FreeStyleGames is an Activision games studio and we’re based in Leamington Spa, England. Other games that we made during my watch include DJ Hero, DJ Hero 2 & Guitar Hero DLC. We also completed SiNG Party, a WiiU launch title for Nintendo and worked on the Call of Duty Online UI as well.
As Art Manager I am essentially responsible for organising and running the FreeStyleGames Art Studio – that’s around 30 artists most of the time – and we do a broad range of work. In a modern games studio you need be able to produce such a wide variety of items in all manner of ways, from traditional to digital and from real time to rendered. It’s a very challenging field that is continually developing. It’s basically a cracking job, fascinating and a huge amount of fun. I’m lucky that I get to work with an incredible bunch of people every day. The only downside is that I don’t get to do so much of the doing these days, but I try and keep my hand in as much as I can.
I’m dangerously close to being called an old timer I think. I’ve been in the games industry now getting on for 18 years and before I became a FreeStyler with Activision I spent 10 years learning my craft at Codemasters, most recently as part of the Racing Studio as the Lead Artist on DiRT and the Assistant Lead Artist on GRID. Sorry, that should have read ‘The BAFTA award winning GRID’! I first worked on the LMA Manager game series (right from the beginning!) and Club Football, Brian Lara Cricket and Flashpoint are back in there as well somewhere.
I like learning new skills and I like a technical challenge just as much as an artistic one. So the management and direction side of games development is the best way of staying involved with all of these things all the time.
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Mike