So you think PixelJunk Eden is a deliciously freeing, genre defying romp through psychadelia but that the whole experience is vaguely familiar somehow? Maybe that's because Eden was designed by the same dude who programmed Star Fox back on the Super Nintendo. In fact, a quick look at Dylan Cuthbert's history in game design shows a pattern of smashing game genre conventions, all the while producing addictive works of beauty.
Way back in 1992, Dylan designed and programmed X, a first person shooter/puzzler that showed off wireframe 3D graphics on the Nintendo Game Boy, a feat that had never been achieved on the clunky grey box before OR after. Based on this exciting new style of gameplay, Nintendo hired Dylan's team at Argonaut Software to develop a 3D arcade shooter for the brand-new Super Nintendo. This led to the production of both Star Fox and the impressive Super FX chip hardware that powered it and many other great SNES games. After designing the unpublished Star Fox 2, a game which was set to mix up the shooting with healthy doses of action and RPG elements, Dylan went to work for Sony, where his prowess for showing off new 3D technology led to memorable tech demos for the Playstation 2, Playstation Portable, and Playstation 3
At his newly-formed Q-Games studio, Dylan and company designed the Playstation 3's XMB user interface, Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS and Digidrive, an example of twitch-gaming that brilliantly mashed the puzzle and race genres into the must-have game of the Game Boy Advance's bitGenerations series (and the only one not designed by skip ltd.) Of course, Dylan's current work is the PixelJunk series of downloadable Playstation 3 games, including the action/puzzle/racer Racers, the arcade/real-time-strategy Monsters, and the hallucinogenic platform/racer/chill-out Eden, with more on the way.
Dream on, Dylan, you lovable madman.
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