Hello and welcome back, this was my third and final session
of Tuesday, we were greeted by the presence of Carl Cavers.
Another master session was underway. This session again was
very informative, and Carl spoke from the heart on how he wants to see the
youth of Nottingham succeed.
Carl left school with a handful of GCSE’S and had no idea
what to do, other than ride his bike! After he finished school, he moved on to
college, Basford college to be exact, and studied business, he said that
business really wasn’t for him and moved on to work at a bike shop, and then to
Plessey Communications, where he came his first chance in the industry. He also
had a part time job before his break in the industry, he lectured part time at
the Peoples College, now formally known as ‘Central College’.
His first industry job came at quite a recognisable company
for its time in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. Gremlin Graphics,
as it was then known offered Carl this opportunity to work on some top class
titles during his time there. After a while of Carl being at this company,
Gremlin had acquired a company named DMA, who had Body Harvest, Lemmings and
GTA 2 in development. What an acquisition!!!
Sometime later, Gremlin had been acquired by Infograms, in a
similar move, Infograms also acquired Hasbro and GT interactive. Carl proceeded
to reel off a list of games that the company had worked on, and it was
surprising, some massive names did pop up and I was surprised that I actually
could remember some of these games!
Sadly, after a while, Infograms choked, and had bitten off
more than they could chew and had to begin closing offices before finally
announcing administration a short time before his company Sumo rose from the
ashes of Infograms.
Like a Phoenix from the ashes, on the 3rd of June
in 2003 Sumo had risen, thanks to the good will of Infograms, they got off and
running almost straight away, taking licenses and hardware that they needed.
Just after they had started up, they received a call from Microsoft, this was
to implement an online capability to the 2004 game, England International
Football, and this was only the start of something special.
Sumo had a special relationship with Sega, in fact, Sumo
loved Sega, Carl spoke of the fact that the project ‘Outrun2’ was his most
difficult, as the IP team in Japan really didn’t want the game to change,
people had apparently tried for 4 years to get the job, all failed. Sumo
managed to secure this project, and managed to complete, they had implemented
certain conditions into the project, one of which was, “The project must be
picture perfect”, Ouch. Such a hard task as Outrun 2 was an arcade title being
transferred onto console!
Sumo have done amazing things, here are the titles of some
projects that that have worked on and completed. Outrun 04, 06, Virtua Tennis:
World Tour, Virtua Tennis 09, f1 2011, Sega Superstars Tennis, Sonic Sega
all-star racing, Sega Rally, Sega all-stars racing: Transformed and most
importantly, Nike+ Kinect Training.
It is worth noting that, Nike+ Kinect Training has just been
nominated for a BAFTA! And in the
session we all applauded such an amazing achievement.
This was another exceptionally insightful session, Carl went
into such detail and went into even more nearer the end of his talk, and the
session was opened to questions. He further opened up on how getting to
industry events will increase your chances of getting into the industry and how
important it was for us to do well at Confetti and burst onto the gaming scene.
Thank you once again for reading this blog post, it is also
worth congratulating Carl Cavers and Sumo for this crazy achievement. You can follow them at @sumodigitalltd
By Nick Mason, Level 3 Gaming student
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