New studio born from RTWâ??s ashes

The first of what is hoped to be a wave of new start-ups has emerged from the ashes of closed studio Realtime Worlds.

Jimmy O’Ready, who was made redundant at the fallen Dundee studio having worked as character lead artist for the defunct MMO APB, is going it alone with his new business.

His new business, Montynero, offers characters and concept art services.

"The character art for APB was praised by the industry, thanks to a strong team effort over many years. For my part I’m interested in basing this company in Dundee, which is a great city full of talent, and collaborating on the next generation of game art with companies across the globe," said O’Ready.

He said Realtime Worlds’ plunge into administration, following lacklustre sales of APB, came as a “shock, even for a ground-breaking high risk project”.

“Personally I felt delays in a couple of crucial areas meant APB simply missed its moment,” he added.

“I salute all the developers involved though, we had some superb people working incredibly hard.

“On the character side we can only provide the best art possible for the product. There was maybe some scope for using a stand-alone character tool to build a larger online community purely through the expressive fun of customisation and socialising.

“That type of technology has a lot of attraction for anyone using personalised avatars to represent online personalities – in any medium.

“We evaluated every other system prior to creating our own characters, a fascinating period of development, and I felt our collective solution was strong, attractive and fun – a real boon to the project.”

Prior to crafting APB character art at Realtime Worlds, O’Ready worked for Electronic Arts on the AWOL snowboarding franchise SSX.