The cofounder of Amsterdam-based Guerrilla Games quit and heads to work for the company behind Dead Space.
It’s not unusual for game developers to jump ship to other companies. That’s just part of working within the incestuous nature of the still comparatively small game industry. Much rarer is the departure of the founder of an entire nation’s game development culture. Guerrilla Games was one of the first major game studios in the Netherlands, and founder Arjan Brussee has been called the “godfather of Dutch game development” – at least by the writer of his Wikipedia page. The Escapist learned today that Brussee has abandoned Amsterdam and the company he founded to work for Visceral Games as a senior-level producer on an unannounced game project.
Brussee’s split with Guerrilla seems to be amicable. “It has been a great ride,” he wrote in a email to his former staff leaked to Dutch-language website Control Online. “Every year there was something ambitious, new and inspiring to put my energy into. For me, I now want to find a new personal challenge, and who knows where this will take me next.”
He goes on to catalogue the accomplishments of Guerrilla Games over the last decade, including shipping Killzone 2 after being pressured by Sony into showing a trailer that wasn’t really indicative of the game.
As for what project Brussee will work on at Visceral, we can only surmise. There’s probably a Dead Space 3 in the works, and there’s been rumors of a sequel to Dante’s Inferno, but I’m holding out for Brussee to make that MacBeth game they’ve hinted at.
I would play the crap out the Scottish game. Especially if it looked anything like this BBC Four production.
Source: Control-Online
