Kuju Entertainment makes new appointments

Kuju Entertainment has appointed Dominic Wheatley as the company’s new CEO and Gary Bracey as the new Commercial Director.

This news is significant for one important reason. Headstrong Games, one of Kuju’s subsidiaries, has created titles such as Battalion Wars, The House of the Dead: Overkill, and Art Academy.

The official announcement has been posted below.

Kuju Entertainment has strengthened its management team with the announcement that Dominic Wheatley is the new CEO and Gary Bracey the new Commercial Director. They bring many years of industry experience and expertise to the company having been active in the games industry since the mid 80’s. Dominic started publisher Domark (which went on to become Eidos) and launched Tomb Raider at E3 in 1996. Gary was VP of Development at Ocean Software and Development Director at Telstar Electronic Studios.

Kuju currently comprises three independent development studios: Headstrong, Zoe Mode and Vatra and is one of the UK’s biggest independent developers.

With its three diverse but very successful studios, Kuju is concentrating on high production value console and PC games. Games in production at Vatra are in the $16-20m range and the other studios start at $3m and up.

‘There are many trends and areas of growth in the industry, but we are looking to work at the higher end of the PC and console formats. Rich cinematic games with strong stories and characters you care about is a hot spot as evidenced at E3 recently. At Vatra we just finished Silent Hill and at Zoe Mode we also specialise in high end family games like Zumba.’ Says Dominic Wheatley.

‘We work with big players such as Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega , Activision, Sony, Ubisoft and Konami. But there are smaller publishers coming through too, with big ambitions. We’re able to produce our own ideas and have them turn into multi million unit sellers like Art Academy and that is increasingly the way I see us going.’

Gary Bracey, Kuju’s new Commercial Director added “I am so impressed by the talent, creativity and potential at all three Kuju studios. Kuju is unique. It has such a breadth of experience which we can now build on to create an absolute world class game maker.’

Source: Kuju Entertainment PR