When Thursday came around I was as excited as a child waiting for Christmas, this was due to the fact today was the day I got to hear from Karl Hilton of Crytek UK thanks to Confetti’s fantastic Industry week. The reason for this being that Crytek is a local games development company here in Nottingham, this alone fills students like me with promise and excitement due to the fact that there is effectively a walk into the industry position here on our doorstep.
We all sat down once again in the lecture room and Karl was introduced to the audience, after briefly saying a few words about who he is and what he does Karl went straight into his pitch with a video of a game he worked on recently which was Crysis 2 multiplayer. I took a lot of things from this trailer such as the production standards of Crytek but most importantly I noticed that videos soundtrack was a recent single from the Prodigy. With this famous track from a notoriously successful band playing in time with the onscreen action I thought to myself These guys know what they are doing
So Karl then began to explain his journey towards being where he is today, firstly graduating with a BA in Architecture he then branched off into a MA in Computer Visualisation and Animation due to the fact that because of the recession at the time it was much cheaper to do so. This was also due to an interest in video games too though of course! So after his time as a student it wasn’t long before he got a job working for Rare ltd. Karl then discussed how it was at Rare that he began working on Goldeneye and Perfect Dark which are two very successful titles for the Nintendo 64, his team consisted of 12 staff and a production time of two years.
After Rare Karl moved to Free Radical where he worked on AAA games for Microsoft and other big names in the industry, it was here that Karl worked on the famously quirky Timesplitters series on the PlayStation 2 console.
Karl explained how after nine years at Free Radical the company was then bought by a Norwegian company known as Crytek to form Crytek UK, expressing that the reason they chose Free Radical was based on the widely successful multiplayer and console titles they worked on.
It was here when Karl really began to divulge in where he comes from and what he does, he went on to explain how the first game he worked on was Crysis 2 and how all of the work on this game was done in-house. This surprised me as a lot of companies use outsourcing; this however shows how efficient and well equipped Crytek are. With this he explained how they are primarily a video game developer who are the key contributors to the Crysis universe, as well as being responsible for the Cryengine software which not only allows for students such as myself access to industry grade development software but also how it is used for external simulation and training.
From this Karl talked about the games industry and showed just how its grown with the aid of some graphs and figures, this was very interesting and is a brilliant resource for use in case studies and essays. Karl showed us how the industry is moving to tailor more to the online market, how digital distribution and cloud gaming is the future and something that Crytek is very interested in. After showing the audience how the digital and mobile markets will soon be on par with the retail marketplace Karl then showed another video demonstrating the power and uses of the Cryengine, being a huge fan of the Cryengine I simply sat back and enjoyed the show.
Karl finished his talk with an open Q and A to which he was asked repeatedly about internships and possible opportunities for students at Crytek UK, it was from this that he explained how Crytek are always interested in the option for interns however the way that publishers hold a strict was in which the production process takes place it is not an easy thing to achieve. This was all music to my ears, hearing about how well Crytek treats young talent and just how friendly the company is I can safely say that I am a lot more relaxed when it comes to reaching out for professional advice. They say never meet your heroes, well today I met one of mine and it feels great.
By Samuel Johnston, FDSC student in Games Technology.
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