Sunday, August 31, 2008

The End of Pivotal Games

Whilst in Rome, I was texted basically letting me know that Pivotal Games was shutting down, not exactly the best way to end a holiday but there was nothing I could do, this partly explains my lack of blogging, as I’ve had to find myself alternate employment and somewhere else to live.

piv_13 The clouds gather over Pivotal Games how ironic.

So it was clear that unless a buyer came in for Pivotal I would have to leave Bristol (again) but this time I was intending to stay in the country as tempting as it would be to move back to Canada.  So we were all working extremely hard to do everything we possiblly could to get Pivotal out of trouble, my team did all they could but it’s hard to motivate everyone when they could all be out of jobs within the month.  I wanted us to do the best we could but I also wanted to make sure that my team had enough time to sort their portfolio’s out.

piv_14The animation team and I getting our drink on, cheers guys 

But credit to all the guys on the team they all pulled together and helped us produce one final trailer for the unannounced game, which I would eventually like to put online, but for the moment I’m not sure it’s appropriate, but I’d like to think that we were working to something that could of been really interesting.  Of course I can only really speak from an animation point of view, we had made some pretty interesting advancements on the tools that Pivotal had, had previously and at least our guys were enjoying there jobs.

But alas it wasn’t to be, but I think that the writing was on the wall and in hindsight with the whole credit crunch and quite a few other games companies going bust it might of been too little too late.

I personally think that the way Pivotal was treated was a little unfair, but we were about 120 people and sustaining that sort of head-count after Denied Ops received luke warm reviews was always going to be tough, the most upsetting thing was that we had some very talented people there and for the first time at Pivotal we were developing some real “next-gen” tools.  Unfortunately we have all had to go our separate ways but not without one hell of a blow out…

piv_06 Haven’t got a clue what I was saying to Alex here, just hope it wasn’t embarassing???

I wish everyone the best of luck, but it’s always a sad day to see another Games Company go down, I was only at Pivotal pretty much a year to the day it closed, and if I had known it’s fate I probably wouldn’t of left Montreal when I did…  But still, Pivotal was good to me and I had a blast working with the people I worked closest with, and there were people I hope to work with again someday.  But it’s time to move on (again).

piv_15

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Roman Holiday

The Trevi Fountain of La Dolce Vita fame


Been a while since I last posted, plenty has been going on, although I have to admit I've been forgetting about the blog because of the evils of facebook, but I intend to change that... Although I have said that quite a few times.

Will try and do a catch up, and I'm sure I'll have some interesting things to say on my Bristol situation in the coming weeks, but anyway...

Saima and I visted Rome last month, and I got to play around with my new camera, so took advantage of this by taking an obscene amount of pictures of ancient ruins, and other fantastic sights. So if you fancy taking a look, just click the link below.

Rome Pictures

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