Welcome to SOFE, Rico!
Rico Holmes has been a guest lecturer at SOFE since fall 2008 and from January next year he will be a part of the SOFE-team. We are extremely happy working with Rico, a person that we all admire since back in the days when Worms invaded our Amigas.
Rico is a Game Industry veteran, with twenty years in the Computer Games industry, with experience in almost every aspect of the business. Starting in 1997 Rico worked for Electrocoin, a London based company specialized in converting arcade machine games into home computer games. Rico left Electrocoin and immediately fell into the role of designing and developing games directly and dealing with publishers first hand.
Rico also has experience of working as a contractor, as well as in-house staff and high management positions, Rico has a very realistic perception of what it takes to get a project to completion. In 20 years of development, he’s very proud of having only one single project being “canned” along the way – an almost unheard of scenario in the games industry.
In the late 1980´s Rico began to design games and create artwork from scratch together with Andreas Tadic in Team17. They came up with the original design concept, and developed their first game entirely self-funded. The complete game and rights were then sold to Codemasters Software for an outright fee.
Rico was the creator of all game design and artwork in for example “Full Contact” (1990), Alien Breed (1991), Project X (1992), Superfrog (1993), Alien Breed Tower Assault (1994) and X2 (1996). In the production of Worms was Rico the creator of the environment artwork (Worms 1994, Worms 2 1997, Worms Armageddon 1999, Worms World Party 2000, Worms Blast 2002, Worms Forts 2004).
Rico´s latest productions, before he started work as Art Director at Custom Red, Rico for example made the additional artwork for Lemmings, was the Lead Artist in Worms Open Warfare, made the Particle systems and visual effects for Worms 4: Mayhem and Worms 3D.
As Rico is versatile with a wide spectrum of tools, CustomRed has been readily able to take on work using any pipeline necessary. Whether it’s 3D Maya or 3dStudio max, whether it’s 2D artwork in Photoshop or 2½D in ZBrush, Rico has experience not just of the package, but using it in a production pipeline.
