Corporate Brochure
This is the section where you can find out who we are, where we've come from, what we do and how we do it. Use the links on the right or the left to read on ...
A Short History of Evolution
Evolution Studios was formed in 1999 by Martin Kenwright and Ian Hetherington. Martin is a 20-year industry veteran who founded Digital Image Design (DID), developers of successful simulation-driven games such as F29, Robocop 3D, EF2000, Wargasm and many more. Ian had previously founded Psygnosis (now Sony Studio Liverpool) and launched Lemmings, Formula 1 and WipeOut. He was key in cementing the PlayStation as a must-have entertainment platform.
With a small team of co-founders, all of whom are still here, we took a driving prototype (and a bucket full of gusto) to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE). Despite never creating a driving or console game, our fledgling company became their first European external development team, asked exclusively to create games in the official World Rally Championship series. In the end we delivered five of them, all of which were a massive critical and commercial success.
The WRC Story
The WRC Years: How Evolution Evolved
The creation of Evolution's first game is a quite remarkable story. It began with Martin Kenwright calling on some ex-Digital Image Design colleagues to help him form what he called a 'dream team' of talent to make games.
Evolution Studios was born back then with a simple ethos: learn lessons from the past, and evolve slowly with a 'crawl, walk, run' mentality. Their 'offices' would be Martin's lounge, where they threw some ideas together and plotted their future. With several motor sport fans in the group, a racing game kept cropping up as an idea - and the ambition to "do for driving what we did for flying" was agreed.
Working For Evo
Increasingly, people are specialising – as technology and players’ expectations move on, new skills are required and new roles develop.
Most development teams have roles in common, but at the same time each one will approach them differently: a ‘Producer’, for example, can mean differing things to different companies.
So where do you fit it? HR, office management and the like aside, here’s a run down of the roles at Evolution.
Programmer
Programmers turn ideas into reality – they make the game work. At Evolution, we have several types of programmer, although there are 2 key categories in particular: