Former Red Storm CEO joins Nice Tech

Cambridge-based MMO developer Nice Tech has strengthened its organisation with the appointment of industry veteran and former Red Storm CEO Doug Littlejohns.

The company was founded in 2005 to design and develop Massively Multiplayer Online games, which have seen an incredible surge in popularity recently, thanks to titles such as Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft.

Under Littlejohn's guidance and advice, the firm are working on a number of MMO titles using their proprietary AliceServer Artificial Reality development platform. According to Nice Tech, the AliceServerAR technology reduces development time and costs by providing an intuitive and comprehensive end-to-end MMO development platform.

Paul Baker, President and CEO of Nice Tech commented: "Having groundbreaking technology and genre defining game ideas are of little use without the experience to leverage them. Doug reinforces our commercial strength and provides us with firm foundations upon which to create our next-generation MMOG virtual worlds."

Littlejohn's first experience of the games industry was in the collaboration with Tom Clancy on submarine title SSN, published in 1996. The game led to the establishment of Red Storm Entertainment, which has enjoyed a number of successful Tom Clancy videogame titles on multiple platforms. Red Storm's success, with Littlejohns serving as president and CEO, led to the acquisition of the studio by French publisher Ubisoft in 2000. The Tom Clancy series of games continue to achieve high sales on all platforms.

In a company statement from Nice Tech, Littlejohns said: "I didn't envisage getting back into the industry, but Nice Tech has designed and built a technology that promises to facilitate and transform the approach taken to MMOG development, greatly reducing development time, cost and, most importantly, risk at a time when playing online is beginning to really take off!"

Nice Tech continues to build a solid management structure, having also recently appointed former business development manager of BBC Multimedia, Stuart Francis. Francis joins the company as sales and marketing director.