About
Me: A videogame executive living in the West Midlands of this most United of Kingdoms. In senior development roles I’ve produced and directed the PC action/strategy game, ‘Hostile Waters’ and the PS2 first-person shooter, ‘Cold Winter’, both collaborations with Warren Ellis; the sensitive political commentary, ’50cent: Blood on the Sand’; the epic ‘Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising’; and in a 3rd party capacity for Activison/Blizzard, ‘James Bond: Blood Stone‘ and ’GoldenEye 007‘. I’m currently working as Vice President, Development, for Codemasters.
In 2002, I was one of the founders and directors of Swordfish Studios, a Birmingham based independent developer which was acquired by Vivendi Games in 2005.
These days I’m particularly interested in the dynamics that underpin exceptional development teams and critically and commercially successful games. I’m interested in how teams communicate within themselves, both verbally and non-verbally, through their games to the gamer, and systemically into larger organisations and the wider industry. I firmly believing that effective, focussed, clean communication practices adopted by creative, ambitious, collaborative and empowered developers, are the basic building blocks of incredible teams.
When not making or playing computer games, I have a passion for books, comics and boardgames; am a keen mountaineer and snowboarder, and enjoy my photography.
The blog: julianwiddows.com is my personal weblog, mostly featuring articles related in direct and tangential ways to the design, development and production of computer games. Sometimes I use it as a consolidator for methods and practices I’ve found effective over the years; sometimes as a sounding board for new ideas; sometimes I use it as a place to discuss digital and print content I’ve consumed and want to talk about. I don’t update it anywhere near often enough. My twitter updates are aggregated here once a week, which are largely a dump of whatever’s in my head at a given moment. I also link across to my Tumblr page which I use as a quote, image and movie repository for things photography, design, architecture, gaming and fashion related.
I answer emails sent to:
and can be stalked on twitter, here:
http://twitter.com/julianwiddows
and on tumblr, here:
http://julianwiddows.tumblr.com/
Note that the opinions expressed on this site are entirely personal and in no way affiliated to my employers, development partners, or work colleagues.
