A visit to Krome Studios

Studio Tour from Yug - Tuesday, 22 August 2006 @ 12:00am

Krome Studios® is the biggest game company in Australia, and one of the largest independent game developers in the world. They've nationally got over 200 people working for them, and they are responsible for the best selling Australian made game of all time, TY the Tasmanian Tiger® which has spawned a series of three award-winning games, to date. Krome Studios is currently working on The Legend of Spyro®: A New Beginning for the current generation systems, and Hellboy (working title) for the next generation systems with publishing partners Vivendi Games and Konami, respectively.

Krome Studios offices are just down the road from where we live, work and play.



It's almost shameful that this is the first time we had ever dropped into their offices, considering I personally walk past them on a daily basis. We've done a brief feature and interview with them almost a year ago, but this time we wanted to physically go inside Krome Studios and see how it all runs.

Myself and Matt arrived just slightly late, mainly due to Matt actually being at home still asleep 15 minutes before we were supposed to be there. The building where Krome Studios is situated certainly isn't hard to find, situated in an Old Mill building in Fortitude Valley, it's typical for companies around the area to have a modern interior inside an unassuming old building.

We missed the actual entrance and managed to go in 'the back way', through the car park and past what seemed like a combination cafe and Laundromat. Confusion abounded until we were met by the lovely Erica Hutton, Krome Studios PR, who had organised the tour for us and generally puts up with our annoying emails the rest of the time. We proceeded to the conference room to have a chat with Steve Stamatiadis.

Steve is the Creative Director at Krome Studios and along with Robert Walsh, CEO, were founding members of the company. Steve is the father and creator of TY the Tasmanian Tiger, and is the person responsible for the artistic direction for the current games. You can read our exclusive interview with Steve on the next page, or bear with me as I continue our tour.



We also met up with my good mate Robert Buterworth, who you may remember from the crazy Guitar Heroes competition from our SupaNova article. He came along and sat in on the demo of Spyro and then followed us around for the rest of the tour. After the interview with Steve, Cameron Davis, Lead Designer on Spyro came in and started up the latest copy of The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning.