Chancellor tour continues to Abertay

Chancellor Alistair Darling visited one of Britain’s principal game design universities last week as part of his UK tour of the game industry.

Develop is told that the Treasury chief visited Abertay University for 45 minutes, and was shown around by campus vice-chancellor, professor Bernard King CBE.

The tour has also seen Darling meet independent UK studios such as Realtime Worlds and Remode – a month after the Chancellor announced to introduce game development tax breaks for the UK sector.

At Abertay, Darling saw, and played, a number of games coming through via the UK’s thriving pool of aspiring game developers.

Pictures of his visit can be found here.

Darling was shown some of Abertay’s best facilities, such as renowned 3D modelling set HIVE, startup business hub White Space, and the campus’ own Centre for Excellence in Computer Games Education.

“The main messages we wanted to communicate to Darling were that computer games are big business, and are growing rapidly,” said a spokesperson for the university.

“We wanted to show that computer games in Dundee and Scotland are particularly strong,” he added, “and that many of the technologies underpinning computer games are proving to have huge potential in many other fields, opening up new areas of research and helping to create the new businesses and industries that will sustain and secure economic growth in the future.”