Santa Cruz Superstar Game Developer Graeme Devine is at it Again!

When we think of Santa Cruz game developers, there are many that come to mind. On the top of that list would be Graeme Devine. Are the rumors true? Does he wear a brand new graphic t-shirt every day? Maybe or maybe not (we heard so). What we do know is that it was a pleasure to get to know him during his days working from Nextspace and that he is a pretty amazing game developer.

What a career he has had. Looking back at some of the companies he has worked at, you can really see the breadth of his experience. He has worked at id software, Microsoft, Apple and more recently Magic Leap. His resume of games he has contributed to includes iconic titles such as Quake 3, DOOM 3, Age of Empires, Halo Wars and many more.

So what is he up to now? Quarantine Studios is a new company born from successful collaborations while Devine and colleagues were working at Mixed Reality start-up Magic Leap.

Here is what Devine said about the new company on his Facebook page:

We started thinking about QXR (as we call it) after we got laid off from Magic Leap and after the Audience of the Future production of Dream was also canceled. Andy Lanning and I had worked for a long time on the AotF project alongside quite a few people from Magic Leap as well as the consortium of companies making it in the UK and we had also bootstrapped Magic Leap’s United Nations outreach by paying to go to the climate change program ourselves to show the power of spatial computing to the UN and how we could help them reduce their carbon footprint.

This team was awesome. We loved working together.

So it was obvious that we had to try to start something.

The only question was how? What do we do? What’s our message?

At the same time I was working on rebooting Metropolis and a new WebXR technology for The Stolen Child (the episodic creative we made for Dream) when I was out walking Bella and I had an idea.

So one Thursday night I pitched the team.

I fiddled for a while on what to make the XR demo do, because it can’t just be blue dots. I was going to just go for Macbeth, because it’s the next play I wanted to do after Midsummer and Midsummer can always be a prequel. Everyone kept on saying “When Graeme shows us something wonderful” and I was like, “source code?”...

Anyway. Metropolis. I’ve been working hard on that on the weekends mostly, but then BLM hit and it made me step back and think about inclusive storylines and the story took a bit of a reset to include other people’s thoughts and journey’s. You can read some of those on metropolisreader.com. I also became enamored with The Electric State and wanted to tell a deep story somehow and explored how to do that.

Basically, I’ve been on a technology quest looking for a story while working on a story that I was looking to tell a little differently and I think I’ve stumbled into something really fun that is really interesting for us all.

QXR. It’s the team. It’s always always about the team.