Cohort Studios at GDC

Cohort Studios has announced that its board of directors, as well as several of its key development staff, will be attending this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco between 9th and 13th March 2010. Along with the usual mix of networking, keeping abreast of industry developments and business development meetings, the team will also be holding meetings to demonstrate new concepts and prototypes from the Dundee-based developer.

Lol Scragg, CEO, Cohort Studios comments “The annual GDC in San Francisco is a real focus for any game developer, but for us it’s essential to attend. The social and networking side alone is crucial to maintain a leading position in the current industry and for us in particular, we’ll be very excited to see what happens in SCEA’s motion controller seminar. I’m also going to be attending several of the self-publishing and self-financing talks, as well as hopefully gleaning some insider knowledge on digital distribution. Finally, I’ll be keeping a keen eye to whatever emerges about the OnLive service this year, as its potential to shake the industry to its core is as real as it was last year, only now we should be hearing a lot more about the scale of the service roll-out and the content in place for launch. ”

Bruce McNeish, CTO, Cohort Studios adds: “For me, I’ll be playing close attention to Sony’s PSP announcements. Now that the Minis range is playable on PS3, I wonder if we’ll see full PSP emulation on the home machine. The Minis gaining a wider userbase was great news for independent studios and I think PSP emulation on PS3 would be equally as welcome. Rumours abound that Sony will unveil a successor to the PSP this year, so there’s a chance there’ll be some news of this at GDC.” Bruce continues, “OnLive continues to be interesting, if it really can deliver as a scaled-up service. I’ll be turning my technical eye to Sid Meier’s talk to see if there’s any discussion of the Civilisation V engine and its implementation of Intel’s Threading Building Blocks technology, which has to be fascinating for anyone interested in cutting edge multi-core processor game engines. Finally, I’m very interested in seeing how Microsoft’s Natal is going to use game design to overcome issues regarding the lack of tactile feedback for motion controls, as I assume we’ll see a fair few demos of Natal in action at the show. The sheer wealth of things to pay attention to at GDC is what makes it such an essential date on any developer’s calendar.”

For more information, please contact:

Tony Coles, Peppermint P.

Tony.coles@peppermintp.com

+44 (0)207 240 2645

About Cohort Studios

Cohort Studios was born in 2006 and is now entering its fifth year of business. As one of the leading game development studios in the UK, Cohort is registered as an official developer across all current home console formats. Comprising a team of over 50 people, and based in the vibrant Scottish city of Dundee, Cohort Studios is wholly owned by its three founding directors; Lol Scragg (CEO), Bruce McNeish (CTO) and Darran Thomas (CCO), who between them have over 43 years of experience in game development, having worked on projects for companies as diverse as Psygnosis, Bullfrog, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Electronic Arts (EA) and Visual Science. Cohort is responsible for bringing the hugely successful Buzz!™ Junior franchise to the PlayStation 3 platform, and is currently working on an exciting project for a major publisher. Cohort Studios is also proud to be the first Scottish game developer to be a recognised Investor in People, a UK government-backed business improvement framework that has a special focus on employee relations. For more information, please visit www.cohortstudios.com.