Super Evil Megacorp is growing its team to begin work on a new transmedia IP for Netflix, with the addition of six veteran developers.
The new staffers are drawn from an assortment of top-tier game companies including Blizzard, Rockstar, EA and Ubisoft.
As announced yesterday, the Vainglory and Catalyst Black maker is working with Netflix on a project that the streaming giant’s external games boss Leanne Lombe said is a “big bet” for the firm.
Super Evil Megacorp CEO Kristian Segerstrale added: “Partnering with Netflix gives us the opportunity to build something much bigger than a single game, and build it simultaneously with a broader IP universe that we’re just super excited about.”
Super Evil Megacorp’s new lead gameplay tech engineer Tim Hume is a veteran of Carbine, Obsidian and Blizzard whose credits include Fallout, WildStar, Outer Worlds and World of Warcraft.
JC Simbulan joins as lead animator, having worked at Hangar 13, Skybox Labs, Squanch Games and more on titles including Halo Infinite, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and High On Life.
Steven Goodwin is SEMC’s new senior technical engineer, a former Microsoft, EA and Playfish developer who has worked on Grand Prix Manager and Die Hard: Vendetta.
Former Ubisoft and Rockstar engineer Jurie Horneman is now lead narrative engineer at SEMC, and joins after working on Watchdogs: Legion, Manhunt 2 and Max Payne 2.
Cassandre Beaumier has been appointed production director, a former Ubisoft producer who has credits on Assassin’s Creed games including Odyssey, Syndicate and Freedom Cry plus The Division and Marvel’s Avengers Battle For Earth.
Rounding out the all-star cast of SEMC newbies is senior level designer Milo Casali, who has worked on games including Final Doom, Global Ops, Bully, Resident Evil Racoon City, Watch Dogs Legion and Far Cry 6 at Rockstar Games, Slant Six Games and Ubisoft.
Super Evil Megacorp boss Kristian Segerstrale told us last year what it had learned from its experiences with Vainglory and how they fed into latest release Catalyst Black.
He also blogged recently about how his studio has been working remotely since before the pandemic, and what he and his team has learned about working this way.
“All cultures decay without active maintenance,” he wrote. “A distributed culture decays faster.”
“Being distributed well means committing to ongoing time spent on tweaks of meetings, trying out new ways to connect people socially, to provide recognition, mentoring and support, seeking feedback and evolving ways to work asynchronously. You have to work harder at this ongoing than a company that is in an office.”
