www.dannuttall.com

I’ll skip any prologue concerning my dramatic headfirst arrival into the middle of the 70s, my primary school period or the subsequent 5 years of educational drudgery called secondary school (which gave me 10 GCSEs and ushered in the era of the pube). I’ll briefly mention that I spent 2 years at Art College doing an OND in graphic design, followed by 2 more years at University doing an HND in Film and Television design. Following University, I started my own business as a designer/illustrator and saw 4 years of moderate success. But by early 2001, I had decided to start looking for employment elsewhere, and in July 2001 I headed off to Leeds to start a new career in the games industry, working for a company called The Code Monkeys.

My first title was a game called XBladez: Inline Skater for the GBA. Then, following its completion, I moved onto the company’s main project, Simpson’s Skateboarding. It was already a year and a half into production so my impact wasn’t massive but I worked on aspects of the UI, prop animations (e.g. collapsing apple stall, snapping bear traps), skateboard designs and some intro cameras. Following the Simpsons, we started a PS1 title called “Neopets, the Darkest Faerie”, but this turned out to be a very troubled project. The publisher wasn’t sure what they wanted so there was a lot of wasted time and work. Things came to a head in September 2003, when Neopets was canned and the company announced redundancies. I was one of the 40 casualties, so I polished my CV and sent it out again, freelancing whilst I waited for potential interviews to come back.

I got one in early December, and I started work at Juice Games the following February. This position would see me working on titles for mobile phones, handheld devices and Next GEN consoles. I worked (as a UI artist) for 2 years on the company’s 2007 release of Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights and, shortly after that, was transferred onto a Flight Sim project called Stormbirds, but sadly this was to be short lived. Company Owners THQ decided, for fiscal reasons, to reduce both their catalogue and workforce which meant culling several studios in the US and cancelling numerous projects, Stormbirds included. With no game to work on, Juice had little choice but to make the Flight Sim team redundant on Monday November 3rd 2008.

By Wednesday November the 5th, I successfully interviewed and accepted a position at TT-Fusion in Manchester, starting December 1st. I was dropped straight into the action by becoming the only UI artist working on Lego Rockband, a multiplatform title released in late 2009. And that brings me up to date, I am currently still with TT-Fusion working on more unannounced game titles.