Blogger Profiles
Kadarn
Kadarn was born in 1980 in deepest, darkest Cumbria, where he spent many a year supporting Carlisle United. Alas, a soul can only take so much disappointment, and it drove him to follow dangerous and questionable pursuits such as acting, music and tabletop gaming. Dreaming of fame and fortune, he betrayed his northern kin and moved down south whereupon he suffered a hideously disfiguring martial arts injury (he fell over and broke his collar bone). This put paid to the acting work for a long while. By the time he was fixed he realised that, while art and performing were all well and good, he really quite liked the idea of getting paid, and so took up a full time job in a finance company.
A couple of years later he realised that finance was really, really boring and so quit his job and moved to Cambridge for the sole reason that the town was very nice. From there he fell into the games industry, initially in managing customer support and then heading up the Community Management team for a fantasy MMO.
Four years later and he is now at Cybersports, strangely relishing his hour and a half train commute each day. He is still amazed that he gets paid to do this job. Acting and music are all well and good, but how many people can spend a fortune on games and hours in front of the computer and be able to excuse it as professional research.
Now if he can just convince his wife of that, all will be well.
Georgenius
George "Georgenius" Kotsiofides was hatched way back in 1970 in London, has been a Liverpool fan since 1973 and has played nearly every kind of videogame ever made.
Despite all this, he managed to get a degree in English and Sociology, along with a Masters degree in Postmodernism, Literature and Modern Culture and put these to good use parking cars before getting a job running an independent games shop.
He soon moved into game journalism, helping set up industry trade paper MCV and became deputy editor there after just 18 months. After leaving MCV, George enjoyed stints as a freelance games writer, with published reviews and articles on Eurogamer.net, and in publications such as PC Format, Develop, MCV and Edge.
With the advent of mobile phones, George taught himself how to write WAP games and designed, wrote and sold a number of titles based on other people's IP including games for Bungie and 3D0.
He then joined Microsoft and helped launch the original Xbox, helping set up the ‘Games Evaluation Team' which analysed games and gave suggestions to developers on how to improve them where possible.
Before long, George found himself working as a game developer himself, and joined Climax London as a games designer for a Nintendo DS and GBA title. He then moved to Nottingham to take on the role of Game Designer at Monumental Games on Football Superstars.
George's favourite game of all time is Tetris. He has an extensive collection of retro consoles, plays guitar badly, loves steak and chips and is a big fan of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. His favourite film is Star Wars. His hair has been growing inwards since 1998.
Phil Friendly
Phil is the Sales and Marketing Manager for CyberSports Ltd, the publishers behind Football Superstars. Phil has been working at the top end of online sales and marketing since 1999 for a number of leading brands on a managerial, director and consultancy basis. Joining CyberSports in November last year it is Phil's responsibility to make sure there are ‘hundreds of thousands of bums on the seats' of Football Superstars when it launches later this year!
Outside of work Phil (as you can see from his first blog) is an unhappy and depressed Southampton fan, a lover of all things football, a father of 1 (Liverpool supporting) 8 year old and a trombonist!
Working out of the CyberSports office in London, Phil makes the odd cameo appearance in Nottingham where he generally causes chaos, goes drinking with Monumental's CEO Rik Alexander, turns up late the next morning looking rather green and is kicked back to London feeling sorry for himself!
thamightyboro
Ben Stewart aka thamightyboro aka smogboy aka that **** who gave me a warning on the forums for excessive smileys.
Ben is a Community Representative for Football Superstars and this is his first job in the industry having been on the opposite side and given devs and Community Reps hassle for the last 11 years, recruited from the wild that is the FS Community.
Ben has been around internet gaming since 1997 starting with Quake before moving onto Kingpin in 1999 where his clan won 4 major European titles in 2 years. Moving from Kingpin to Medal of Honour he was becoming disillusioned with FPS so decided to try a geeky RPG and from the moment he played through KOTOR he found himself wanting more.
Ben is a die hard Boro fan. He insists if football does have a god then he is named Juninho. He takes great pride in letting Newcastle fans know that they haven't won any silverware in nearly 40 years.
In case you hadn't figured it out by his constant drivel on the forums about Star Wars his need to set up a PMC named “Rogue Squadron” or his desk showing his umpteen Vader toys and lightsabers, Ben truly is a Star Wars geek having read every Star Wars book written and watched the movies more times than most students have had pot noodles. We may as well change his name to Wookiepedia.
Wartortle
Rocco Loscalzo is CTO of Monumental Games Ltd and heads up the Software Team on Football Superstars.
Whilst maybe a bit long in the tooth now, he has always been involved with computers going back to the very first days of the Sinclair ZX-81, Oric-1, Commodore 64 and Dragon 32. Games have always held a particular interest but the real passion lies in all of the technical challenges involved in Software Development.
After graduating from Loughborough University with a BSc (hons), he 'slipped up' and landed himself a job working in the Business Software world. Starting as a Junior Software engineer in 1987, he scaled the dizzy heights of management before achieving a Director position in 1999. Luckily, he came to his senses and ditched the 'easy life' just prior to the Y2K debacle that never was and joined Charybdis Ltd as a Software Lead in 2000. Ultimately working on Magic & Mayhem: The Art of Magic, he then joined Climax Online in 2001 before being promoted to Technical Director. Whilst at Climax, he was also Software Lead on the original Warhammer Online MMO and has been involved with MMO development ever since.
