Lead Portal Designer Kim Swift Joins EA’s Motive Studio
Kim Swift, the woman who led development on the highly acclaimed Portal, has joined EA’s Motive studio in Montreal, taking up a new role as a design director. She will worker under Jade Raymond and be part of the collaboration between Motive and Visceral Games, working on the Star Wars project that is headed by Amy Hennig.
“We’ve devoted much of the past year at Motive to building a team of amazingly talented people to work on our new IP and Star Wars projects. I could not be more excited to welcome an all-star like Kim, who shares our enthusiasm for building exceptional games,” Raymond said in the company’s announcement.
Swift joined Valve after her and several of her fellow graduates created Narbacular Drop, which impressed Gabe Newell enough to offer the team jobs at his company. They went on to create Portal and the designer later worked on games such as Left 4 Dead and its sequel. Since then, she has worked as Airtight Games and Amazon.
Motive is a development studio that was formed in Montreal last year. According to information released by EA at the time, the studio would work in close partnership with Visceral Games and BioWare Montreal, who are currently working on Mass Effect: Andromeda.
“Motive will be a creative-driven team, incubating entirely new IP and taking on some amazing projects,” said Raymond when the announcement was made. “The first one is going to be really exciting – we’re going to work on Amy Hennig’s Star Wars game!”
Very little is known about the Star Wars project that is being helmed by Visceral Games and Amy Hennig. The game has been in development for several years and is expected to release in 2018, though, other details have so far been kept secret by the developer. Leading rumors speculate that the game will take place between Star Wars: Episode III & Episode IV, with players taking control of multiple protagonists.