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Serious Games International has bolstered its games industry experience with the appointment of several senior academics.
Mark Stanger, Gary Knight (pictured), Paul Ranson, Felix Bradshaw and Mark Cottam join the organisations which was set up to combine game development talent with academic research in the arena of serious games, and recently appointed former Sega executive Mike Hayes as its executive chairman.
“The senior team that we’re building here will work with our colleagues in academia to bring a fresh but proven perspective to the business of applying games techniques to serious software solutions,” said Tim Luft, managing director of SGI, and formerly a director of the Centre for Urban Intelligence and the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University.
“The potential is massive: global revenues in this market are predicted to double over the next three years.”
Stanger has been appointed as commercial director and will be coordinating all such operations at SGI. He has 20 years experience in interactive entertainment having worked for publishers, including Eidos and Warner Bros. Most recently he was responsible for establishing European operations for the social web analytics firm Kontagent.
Knight will serve as a content and branding consultant. He is a former senior vice president of marketing for Sega, where he oversaw the company’s content and brand strategy across Europe and North America.
Ranson is now development director of SGI’s creative studio. He was formerly managing director of Slam Productions. Prior to that, Paul was founder and MD at two other games studios, Aqua Pacific, and Big Red and also worked at the games publisher Codemasters.
Bradshaw is to lead business development efforts at SGIL. He spent eight years in games publishing at Codemasters, South Peak and 7Sixty.
Lastly, Cottam will head up SGI’s new US office as VP of business development and operations, having joined the company from Mumbojumbo where he was CEO.
