Today, Crystal Dynamics announced that they were expanding and opening a new studio. Named Crystal Northwest and located in Bellevue Washington, this new team is being built as a satellite studio to help support work on the upcoming Avengers game and other projects such as future games and tech.
Here’s the logo design for Crystal Northwest:
Scot Amos, Co-Head of Studio at Crystal Dynamics spoke about the new studio, saying “We’re aggressively scaling up our teams and adding a new studio with spectacular talent to deliver the ultimate gaming experiences for our players. We have assembled a team of industry veterans and leaders in order to create gaming experiences that surpass the expectations of our passionate community.”
The new team will be led by Chad Queen and James Loe. In addition to establishing a new studio, Crystal Dynamics announced several new hires for their main team in Redwood Shores.
Vince Napoli is the new Lead Combat Designer at Crystal Dynamics, having previously worked on the God of War series as Lead Systems Designer. Ben Wanat is the co-founder of the Dead Space series and served as Creative Director on Dead Space 3. David Fifield worked as Executive Producer and Design Director at 343 Industries.
In addition to developing a new Avengers game, Crystal Dynamics is providing support on Shadow of the Tomb Raider after being the primary developer for the previous two games in the reboot series. This is certainly a large expansion on the part of Crystal Dynamics and it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.
