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  • Sanuk Games opens Canadian studio led by Ali Kojori

3rd October 2008

Sanuk Games opens Canadian studio led by Ali Kojori

Sanuk GamesBangkok/VancouverSanuk Games, a leading independent game studio in Southeast Asia, announced today the opening of a new studio in Vancouver. Ali Kojori, a seasoned game executive and entrepreneur, is appointed as managing director.

Ali started his career in the entertainment industry in 1994 as an FX/Character Animator/Lead Animator with Morning Glory Images and with Mainframe Entertainment on various television shows. In 1999, Ali moved into the video game industry at Electronic Arts, starting out in research and development on the upcoming PS2 and Xbox game consoles, and switching shortly thereafter to Technical Art Director role for a number of AAA titles including Def Jam: Vendetta (AKI), NBA Street, SSX, SSX Tricky, Triple Play Baseball 2001 and Fight Night 2004 (NuFX Chicago). He also served as Animation Director on FIFA 2003.

In April of 2004, Ali founded NextGen Entertainment, a new game production company. NextGen secured a contract with their first client Ubisoft to complete their Racing/Combat title 187 Ride or Die on which he served as Producer. In June 2005, Ali was assigned as a Senior Producer on a PS2, XBOX, PC title Heroes of Pacific, Published by UbiSoft / CodeMasters and Developed by IR Gurus Interactive in Australia. The game was released in October 2005.

Ali joined Mainframe Entertainment in 2006 to create and manage their new gaming and interactive department. In his one-year stay at Mainframe Ali managed to complete number of projects for Electronic Arts, RockStar, Silicon Knights and Radical Entertainment.

“We’re very glad to have Ali on board with us. His in-depth experience and knowledge of the game industry in North America, along with his good credentials, will help us establishing trust and bridging the gap”, says Yan Marchal, CEO of Sanuk Games.

“We’ve achieved tremendous growth in 2008, but most of our deals are with European clients. We have yet to develop the business in America, and Ali has the capabilities we were lacking to achieve that”, he added.

Ali is set to share his time between Vancouver, where he will conduct business development and source local talents for high value added tasks, and Bangkok, where he will supervise the core production of his projects.

With studios at both ends of the world, Sanuk Games brings the best of East and West together to develop quality games at an affordable price.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under National News, Studios. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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