If you could be any of the Elemental Warriors or other characters in Kameo, which one would you be, and why? Tough call. I’d probably pick Thermite. Why, for me he just has one of the coolest moves in the game in the form of an upgrade called Backblast. Maybe I’m just naturally sadistic but the move gives me enormous satisfaction in the way that you can just…Nah, I’m not telling, you’ll just have to check it out for yourself when you play the game.

Mark Stevenson: Lead Artist

Can you tell us something about your personal history, education, and work history?
After school, I went into higher education and did a general art and design course followed by a graphic design course which initially covered graphic design, advertising, and illustration. I had to specialize on this course so I chose illustration for the final year. I’d always been mad into games and was quite annoyed and frustrated when my final year project that I wanted to do of designing and illustrating covers for videogames was frowned heavily upon by the lecturers, forcing me to alter this project for book covers (whoopee). It’s good to see that attitudes in higher education have changed a lot since then with courses dedicated specifically to games starting to appear around the world.

Anyway, as I’ve already said, I was always mad into games starting with the arcade (bizarrely [see later] the original Donkey Kong arcade machine being one of my first addictions), I progressed onto the Atari 2600 (much to the disappointment of my French teacher as I chose to have the Atari for Christmas rather than my Mum and Dad pay for me to go on some crappy school trip to France—you’ve got to get your priorities straight, haven’t you?) I then went through the usual home computer scene that is synonymous with us Brits, I was a Commodore man (C64 followed by an Amiga, great days for the sheer volume of creativity and exciting and unique ideas). On to Rare, I’ve worked here pretty much since leaving college (12 years now), it’s the only job in the industry I’ve had. When I started I was fortunate enough that my first game I worked on was Donkey Kong Country (I did one background, most of the props and most of the promotional artwork). After this I did Donkey Kong Country 2 (several backgrounds, most of the props again, modeled and animated a couple of the characters, and again most of the promotional artwork). Next was Donkey Kong Country 3, I got the chance to be lead artist on this one and modeled and animated most of the main characters, did a lot of the props again and several of the backgrounds and most of the promotional artwork. So the last project I did before Kameo™: Elements of Power™, I’m sure you can guess by now, was Donkey Kong 64 again in the role of lead artist. Then onto where we now: Kameo: Elements of Power.

Over the long course of the game’s development, how has your contribution ebbed and flowed? 
Straight from DK64 we started working on planning and designing Kameo. As lead artist I devoted a lot of time to getting the core graphics systems of the game up and running with the programmers, then we went on to prototyping the game into its initial form as seen on the GameCube at E3 many years ago (check out the movies if you haven’t already, there’s some really cool stuff that helped sow the seeds for what Kameo was to become). Towards the end of the development time we spent on Gamecube, my involvement as lead artist ceased and I just continued as an individual contributor mainly on modeling characters and doing effects. But then when the Microsoft buyout of Rare happened and we moved the game to Xbox I took the reins again as lead artist and started to become more involved in the actual game play design also. Through our work on Xbox and then Xbox 360® my contribution has gradually become less and less about creating actual content and more of a managerial role, overseeing the art side of the project and sticking my nose into the design side of the project as much as I can (and am allowed to).

When you heard that Kameo would come out on the Xbox 360 platform, how did your approach to the artwork change?
It’s been kind of like going back to the beginning of my career; the techniques we employ now are very similar to how we produced graphics for Donkey Kong Country via prerendering. Only we can produce better results now in real time than we could achieve with the limitations of prerendering solutions back then. It’s great from an art point of view as we’re rapidly getting into a situation where the only limitation is your imagination. For Kameo we totally revised the lighting and shadowing solution. Everything uses shaders as in prerendering to create realistic looking materials with bump mapping (or normal mapping) and specular shine and we have this really amazing effect we’re using called parallax mapping that make the surfaces look even more three dimensional than even I can believe.

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