It’s game-on in Hatfield: Cutting-edge video game designers set up for growth

Great article from The Daily Hampshire Gazette. Check it out!

HATFIELD – “Whoa!” said art director Tom Gale, who was seeing a spinning, spewing Fire Cactus on his monitor for the first time. The creature nearly consumed the characters he was trying to navigate through a plethora of computer-generated peril. “That’s pretty cool.”

Gale was “shoveling content” into a downloadable version of the video game “Fate: The Cursed King,” processing disparate elements from remotely loaded digital files into the game to see how effectively they’d interact.

“When you sit down, you might see lots of new items,” he said, “new monsters, new abilities, new spells and animator’s effects. I spent hours last week listening to screams and howls.”

Mention games in bucolic Hatfield and one might think of legendary coach Sherry Webb and her Smith Academy field hockey teams, or maybe pitch at the senior center.

But the agrarian community is home to a major player in the $3 billion-and-climbing video game industry. [...]