Meet Team Röki - Tom

Hanging with the Guerrillas - circa 2004

1 - Introduce yourself 

Hello! I'm Tom and I'm the other co-founder of the studio along with Alex. As well as helping to run the company I'm primarily responsible for the environment art and design work (thankfully Samu has recently come on board to help with that side of things as well!)

Previously I was an Art Director at Sony's Guerrilla Cambridge studio, leading the visuals on games like RIGS and Killzone Mercenary.

2 - What was / who was your inspiration for wanting to be in the gaming industry?

It probably sounds stupid, but when I was younger I had no real sense that you could even make a career out of making computer games. It definitely wasn't a job listed in the school career computer that did it's best to link you with the dullest job ever.

Obviously I played a lot of games, but I'm not sure I ever really considered who or how they were made. They were just too cool to be made by mere mortals surely? To add some perspective, this was before social media and that 24/7 exposure we have to studios and devs today. The most high tech thing I did was to mail order video games out of a magazine to try and get the best deals!

My best subject in school was always art, closely followed by maths (I know right? check me out!), and I kind of figured that there was no way of combining the two, until I stumbled on a computer animation degree at Bournemouth which needed both of them! This is my calling I thought!

Growing up I was really into model making and designing things, so in hindsight I think that's probably where it all started.

I'm still doing those things today, just on a magic computer box instead.

3 - Favourite childhood game

Flashback. No doubt about it. Man I loved that game. My older brother brought it home one day and it blew me away. I'd never seen such amazing animation before (I did not know what roto-scoping was back then). I still get tingles when I think of how smoothly all the anims chain together. That coupled with the sci-fi narrative had me hooked, Check out my previous blog post about it for some bonus reading.

4 - Favourite game of the moment

Man, that's a tough one. God of War is ace, but that's way too obvious an answer. I've actually just started playing What Remains of Edith Finch and that's fantastic. Coming from an environment art background I'm a sucker for visual story telling (it's not as easy as people think), so it's right up my street.

I suspect there's a lot of cooler stuff to come as well, so I'm looking forward to playing more.

5 - Who do you think would make you starstruck?

Probably Sparth. His concept art is consistently stunning, particularly how quickly he creates images and the techniques he uses. It would be very cool to sit down with him and pick his brains for a bit. Otherwise it would be Arsene Wenger. Nothing whatsoever to do with computer games, but any other fellow Arsenal fans will know where I'm coming from!

6 - And finally… Describe Röki in 5 words or less

A magical story of redemption.