A fan has done some meticulous research looking up the staff of Big Red Button, currently at work on Sonic Boom for 3DS and Wii U. Interestingly enough, the company is not just made of former Naughty Dog employees, but also other former Sony developers, including High Impact, Superbot, and Sony Santa Monica.
First off, we have Bob Rafei, famously from Naughty Dog and one of Big Red Button’s founders. Bob was there for all of Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot games, all their Jak and Daxter games, and Uncharted.
E. Daniel Arey is the other cofounder from Naughty Dog, who worked with Rafei as BRB on The Lost Frontier. Arey now works for Blizzard.
Eric Iwasaki, another Naughty Dog veteran, is Sonic Boom’s Lead Technical Artist and is working on tweaking CryEngine 3 for the Wii U version.
Victor Murillo, originally an environment artist at Insomniac, is Senior Environment Artist at Big Red Button. Justin Rasch, Adam Yeager, and Shiva Adloori, all come from High Impact games.
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. There are seven former Superbot employees who now work at Big Red Button. We’ll run each of them down for you, and their current positions in Big Red Button, below.
- Niles Tucker, Environment Artist
- Kevin Hsu, Combat Designer
- Jonathan Nielsen, Programmer
- Carl-Henrik Skårstedt, Senior Programmer
- Dainer Ramirez, Lead Character Artist
- Mark Vernon, Combat Designer
- Lisa Kapitsas, Producer
Big Red Button also picked up two environment artists from Sony Santa Monica, Greg Prior and Dannie Carlone. Finally, we have from High Impact games two more developers, game designer Ben Strickland, and junior animator David Nam, who did some work for Disney as well.
Finally, two developers are worth bringing up on their own. Lead Level Implementer Chris Senn is best known for Sonic X-Treme, and has also worked on Spyborgs for the Wii.
Todd Ammons is perhaps the crown jewel of all the discoveries here, as assistant animator during Disney’s Renaissance era. He worked on Disney films like Tarzan, Hercules, and Beauty of the Beast. His game related resume includes Ratchet Deadlocked, Resistance Fall of Man, and game versions of Ratatouille and Wall-E. He is BRB’s Senior Animator.
Without a doubt, Sega and Nintendo nabbed quite a deal picking up this team to make the latest Sonic game for Wii U. If you had any reservations about Sonic Boom, we hope this would have changed your mind.
