When Wheelman developer Midway Newcastle closed its doors on July 14, work stopped on followup game Necessary Force and former staff hurried to find new jobs wherever they could. But art director Cumron Ashtiani had another plan: to found with three of his art team Atomhawk, a new creative visualisation studio that specialises in producing concept art, videos and interface design.


This is the story of how the end of Midway Newcastle marked the start of a new venture for an artist that began his career at such studios as Gremlin in Sheffield before leading art on The Thing at Computer Artworks and on Battalion Wars at Kuju. During his 12 year career the art of making games has transformed, and now he's now part of a new revolution: the rise of a new form of outsourcing - not to far-distant companies but to local and highly experienced specialists.

What were your feelings as you waited to hear whether Midway Newcastle would stay together and that your hard work on Necessary Force wouldn’t be wasted?
It was very tough. You have to bear in mind that I was probably the first person to work on Necessary Force, just after New Year 2009, coming up with ideas and designing the world. We found out that Midway was probably going to have to sell off the studio in mid-April and realised that we would have to find a buyer, so we had to go from doing documentation and doing fixes to the Wheelman codebase to piling into proper development for the demo.

By the time we got to July, in the director group, we knew the writing was on the wall. By then we had gone through a few avenues with publishers saying that if it was last year we’d have bought you in a blink of an eye because we had money. Literally we had companies that were trying to do a deal with us but the money just wasn’t in the market. We were then left with the big players – Activision, EA, Ubisoft – and their problem was they’re too large. They’d send an acquisitions manager in and he’d say that we looked good but it’d take six months to do the deal. But Midway was saying that as soon as the deal with Warner went through there wouldn’t be anyone - the legal and financial teams - at Midway to do the deal. So no one came forward in the period with a serious proposal.


_{^{Concept art from Necessary Force}}

So you were fairly aware of the state of play.
That was my third company folding in 12 years. I’ve seen it happen before. The company was very honest with the staff too – everybody knew that we only had a few options left on the table. But we knew the game was good. You get an intuition for this but we knew it was going to be a good one – all the ideas slotted together beautifully; the game design features, the art style. Everyone was enthusiastic. The art style was unique – I wanted to take Midway away from all those run-of-the-mill Unreal-based games that all look the same and do something really stylish and lavish. All that was working. We only lost a handful of staff in those few months, and we hoped someone would see that and do a deal. In any other market it would have been done. I’ll always look back and say that this was the most painful fold because I knew we’d done nothing wrong and it was a good game. Wheelman wasn’t an amazing game, but this was the culmination of all our learning.


_{^{The team. From left to right: Ashtiani, Pete Thompson, Corlen Kruger and Steven Pick}}

At what stage did you decide to create your own studio?
I probably had the idea for it eight years ago. I figured that there are so many developers out there that don’t have the resources available to put their pitch and pre-concept ideas together for their next project because they’re busy making the current one. I was thinking that you could make a business producing that pre-concept material.

Also, having hired concept outsourcing companies before, I think you need to have a lot more contact with them – it’s a creative partnership and the best I’ve worked with are actually local. The ones I’ve hired that are further afield, in Vietnam and places like that, just haven’t worked. They’re not part of the project team. But it never happened because I was following my career in games. Then at Easter this year when we started to notice things starting to go sour at Midway I dropped an email on the side to the team to say that if things go wrong that’s what I was thinking of doing. We met in the pub a few times and the guys liked the idea of working on a lot of different games and styles rather than spending three years getting sick to death of drawing the same thing over and over again. Then I started running around like a lunatic in July when we were told it was looking likely that the studio would close, talking to regional development agencies and to people about office space and buying PCs, lining it all up. And then on July 14 that was it - I got everything together in a few weeks.