Nate Dearsley · Art Director, Squadron 42

Yeah, it's a really long story and I'll try and abbreviate it as quickly as I can. In school, I always wanted to be an architect. I was fascinated with engineering and all that kind of stuff, and physics and maths and art. All of those worlds sort of come together. I was due to go off and study architecture, but a quite serious car accident meant I missed my window at that time, and bizarrely I ended up in catering for a year, which ended up being two years, which ended up being three years, which ended up being four years, because I got used to the money, I got used to the lifestyle, and I just thought, you know what, I'll just kind of do what I do, and I just ended up hating it. Absolutely hating it. So I went back to uni, what you would term a mature student then, and just studied. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do something with graphics. I didn't know it was going to be 3D. My whole family is quite creative. I just wanted to do something creative in 3D. Yeah, that's what I did. I just threw myself at it hammer and tongs. And then literally every living, breathing hour that I had spare, I was doing 3D work. That's what I really sort of leant towards. And I got my first gig in the industry with a company called Free Radical Design. They no longer exist anymore. Well, they do actually. They've just opened up shop again. But they're the people behind TimeSplitters. And my first game that I got to work on, unofficially, was Star Wars Battlefront III. It never was. And that was the game that, well, it was just the 2008 financial crash, a lot of bad stuff happened. So yeah, my first title was pretty awesome to get, and I've just sort of lived and breathed sci-fi ever since.