Artillery hires StarCraft champ as game designer

Palo Alto-based startup Artillery is entrusting the World StarCraft champion Sean Plott with lead design on an upcoming browser title.

Plott, better known by his Starcraft handle ‘Day[9]’, happens to have taken a graduate degree in Interactive Media (game design) at USC, but after graduation began working in web TV.

He met some of the future Artillery studio members through a gaming league, and when the team reached out to him later, he was intrigued.

“Artillery set out to do the impossible: to have graphically intensive, triple-A games load quickly and run smoothly in the browser,” Plott related on his blog.

“After gently explaining to Ankur why the idea was technologically infeasible, he pulled out a laptop and showed me an already working demo… on a laptop getting a signal from tethered phone.”

The idea was exciting enough to get him and his business partner Erik Burkhart on board as head of gaming and head of growth respectively.

The Artillery blog post announcing the news was just as enthusiastic, and explains why having a web tv host like Plott is such a boost

“Anyone who follows gaming knows why Sean is one of the most popular personalities on the Internet,” said Artillery’s Ankur Pansari in a company announcement.

“He is able to tune in to the emotions of millions of gamers around the world, and his superior insight and captivating personality are some of the reasons why his gaming commentary videos are watched over sixty million times per year.”

The studio hasn’t revealed its first project yet, but the details provided so far – an HTML 5 and WebGL based browser game targeting core gamers – are certainly intriguing.