With several industry veterans at the helm, Seattle-based Drifter Entertainment has announced its plan to bring the rapidly evolving field of e-sports to virtual reality. Founders Ray Davis, Kenneth Scott, and Brian Murphy have spent their careers building platforms including HoloLens, Oculus Rift, Xbox One, and Unreal Engine 4, as well as experiences like Gears of War, Doom 3, Halo 4, and Bullet Train. They aim to leverage that experience with Drifter.
“We’re passionate about the opportunity to finally bring our vision to life,” says Ray Davis, who most recently served as General Manager for Unreal Engine 4, following his role as a CTO at Microsoft on the HoloLens project. “Virtual reality represents a rare opportunity to build an entirely new generation of game experiences to completely immerse yourself in. We’re combining our expertise in crafting incredibly polished games along with our early expertise with VR to build some truly amazing (and fun!) games for these emerging platforms.”
Davis is joined by Kenneth Scott, whose 15 years of experience as an art director in AAA game development have brought him to a number of industry-leading companies, including id Software and Microsoft Game Studios. Scott’s gameography includes titles such as Quake 3, Doom 3, Rage and Halo; most recently, he worked at the cutting edge of VR, directing a team of veteran developers at Oculus.
The team is rounded out by Brian Murphy, who spent the last decade as a designer and creative director at Microsoft. Murphy helped take several major platforms and games from incubation all the way to ship, including Xbox One, Microsoft HoloLens and the Xbox Kinect. Most recently, he helped create the virtual travel experience Holo Tour for HoloLens. “It’s pretty humbling to collaborate with such an amazing group of developers,” says Murphy. “The stuff we’ve put together over just the last few months has each of us the more excited than we’ve been about anything we’ve ever worked on. We can’t wait to show everyone what we’ve been up to.”