Get in the Game finalists get green light from Sony

Sony are looking into publishing three of the five game concepts submitted to a company panel by finalists of Northwest Vision & Media’s Get in the Game development project.

Following a Pixel-Lab hosted pitching workshop in December which helped companies in Northwest England learn how to present their work to large scale companies, five developers from the region were given £10,000 each to develop a game concept for a product with the potential to be published via the PSN service.

Sony’s panel consisted of Phil Gaskell, senior producer at Sony XDev Studios Europe, Graeme Ankers, game director at Liverpool Studio, and Clemens Wangerin, development director at Liverpool Studio. The Sony representatives selected two titles to go forward for internal ‘green-light’ meetings, while an additional project is to be considered for further development at some point in the future.

“It was reassuring to see a commitment of public funding like this from Northwest Vision & Media and it’s clearly helped the teams involved strengthen their skills in many areas," said Gaskell. "I’m confident we’ll be taking some of the ideas generated through this initiative to market.”

Enda Carey, Head of Games and Digital Content at Northwest Vision & Media, added: "We were delighted with the response to the first Get in the Game project and encouraged by the quality of content that has come through. We hope to be able to extend the scheme this year to offer more companies in the region the opportunity to get involved with game development and we feel this is a clear role for Northwest Vision and Media”