About Us

Core Talent Games is a new type of game company. It is the missing piece that links the highest quality game design with the most strategic game finance. Think of it as the Miramax or United Artists of the game industry.

Located in Toronto, with a field office in San Francisco, Core Talent Games provides video game designers and their investors the opportunity to develop profitable prestige and quality game projects. It gives game designers a new option beyond traditional game publisher financing—one that encourages them to bring their best work to the table. It gives investors a diversified and managed approach to financing games that are refreshingly original, and thus profitable.

When games are made today, they are treated as vehicles for companies, the key talent viewed as employees subservient to those companies. Core Talent Games reverses this—doing project-based development listening to key talent in order to make the best games, all other elements arranged around this.

Core Talent Games rewards core game design talent directly via a contractual arrangement—a deal based roughly on established practice in other creative industries, yet rarely used by the game industry; but also a deal tailor-made for game development needs.

When Core Talent Games greenlights a project, it takes it through an early low-pressure, low-cost design and prototyping phase. If it likes how the project turns out, it brings it forward in prototyping cycles, until finally entering scheduled full production. It then markets and distributes the final game.

Core Talent Games bring out of the shadows the best creativity core game designers have to offer—the creativity they secretly harbour for fear of letting it go without fair compensation, or of not getting it made due to the complexity of running a new game company. Core Talent Games cuts to the chase… We know talent designers are holding awesome game ideas and designs close to your chest… We want to see those designs. Let’s talk.

Team

Tim Carter CEO: Tim Carter is a freelance game designer and producer in Toronto, Canada. Tim works on game projects requiring strong, realistic content. Tim hails from the film industry where he wrote and directed short narrative films, one-off documentaries, and wrote and optioned screenplays. An avid gamer since the 1980s, Tim has done game design professionally since the mid-1990s, eventually working for BreakAway, Amaze Entertainment and other companies. Tim’s credits include core design on Code Orange (a 3D mass casualty incident serious game) and design on Frontlines: Fuel of War (a next-gen game by Kaos Studios/THQ), and as consulting game designer for a pandemic training game developed in the Washington DC area by Simquest for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. Tim has taught game business, game narrative design and filmmaking at the University of Ontario, Information Technology. Currently he is CEO of Core Talent Games Ltd, a company which packages game projects by connecting key game designs and design talent with outsourced technology solutions and production companies.

Thomas Grové, CCO: Thomas Grové is a game designer and producer in San Francisco, California. Thomas works as a freelance designer, offering design consultation for major brands, and as a creative producer with Studio Interrupt, with a focus on developing niche prestige products. Thomas is also an organizer of the San Francisco chapter of the International Game Developers Association. Thomas has worked as a designer/producer for Foundation 9 (Backbone Entertainment), as a designer for Stormfront Studios, and as an analyst or consultant with companies such as Disco Pixel, Mightyplay, Mastiff, and Activision(Shaba Games). His shipped titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles, Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1, 2, and Remixed, Sega Genesis Collection, and Shrek Super Slam.

Rob Crandall, COO: Robert Crandall is a veteran developer and project leader in Toronto, Canada with extensive experience developing applications for the insurance, HR and medical information industries. He was a partner in a start-up that took a new business application from original design to Fortune 500 sales in four years. A lifelong gamer and history buff, Robert has been developing computer wargames as a creative outlet—first with Simulations Canada and then with Matrix Games—for many years. He has released four games, the most recent of which is Flashpoint Germany. Robert has a degree in law and a BA in history and politics.