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