This month I moved to the UK to work at NCsoft Europe, based in Brighton. I’ve joined their new internal development team, which is working on multiple unannounced games. I absolutely love the new job and the people who work at the company. Though to my surprise no one in the UK wears bowler hats and surprisingly few people eat marmite. Even the British weather has been somewhat acceptable so far… so what’s going on here?
Before crossing the channel I wrapped up my job at Woedend! in Amsterdam, where for the past few years I worked on (amongst many other things) several browser-based MMOs and many advergames. I especially did a lot of preproduction on a 3D browser MMO racing/rpg game with a really unique setting, which hopefully will get funding and enter production soon. There’s still some early demo videos here. My last Woedend! projects were advergames for clients such as 7UP, ASICS and Voetbal International, which if you are in Holland you might see show up on the interweb soon.
In between leaving Woedend! and joining NCsoft I also did some brief consulting at Avaloop in Vienna. They are working on a rather interesting “lifestyle” oriented MMO called Papermint.
But, like I said, I’ll be in Brighton now. And Brighton is awesome. Did you know that Brighton will soon be home to the world’s largest inland giant squid processing facility? It will be connected to the sea through an old underground tunnel that’s been unused for centuries. At least, that’s what it said on a city council construction notice somewhere in town, which is apparently it’s part of some kind of ARG, but I’m going to pretend it is true.
Hey, my name is Marek Bronstring and I design games at Atari. You are looking at my rarely-updated game design blog. I think this space needs some more text so let me tell you what my top favorite animals are: 1) meerkats 2) 
Wow, you actually moved to Brighton, the unofficial capital of the Thumb? Congrats for the new job, it sounds like a right tonic!
Or something. I don’t know what that means.
brkl
May 18th, 2008
Congrats and good luck on the new adventures!
The Thumbs are re-uniting, eh? Everybody lives in Brighton.
Kolzig
May 21st, 2008
Hey Marek, just stubled upon this entry — congratulations, and good luck with the new job!
Will you be at the GC 2008? We might have a couple of beers, at EA’s expense…
Martin Ganteföhr
May 22nd, 2008
Thanks Martin. Not sure if I’ll be at Games Convention this year, as it may conflict with a holiday, but if I go then I’m definitely up for raiding EA’s beer stash.
Marek
May 27th, 2008
That dense, vertical environment in the Bad Petrol video looks pretty cool. I hope it gets picked up too, I’d play it!
steve
June 7th, 2008
Ah, finally announced! Congrats Marek
Brighton is indeed awesome, hopefully see you in July around Develop.
I missed this post while I was in holiday… in Amsterdam ¬¬
Nachimir
June 12th, 2008