Kim Swift, best known for her work on Portal and the Left 4 Dead games while at Valve, is joining Jade Raymond at EA’s Motive Studios as design director, the company announced today.
Swift will be the studio’s design director.
“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,” Raymond wrote in a prepared statement. “I could not be more excited to welcome an all-star like Kim, who shares our enthusiasm for building exceptional games. Her first question to me: ‘When can I set up the Frostbite engine and start prototyping?’ shows a hands-on approach that we value here at Motive. The team is buzzing with new ideas and I can’t wait to see what we can bring to life together. “
Raymond, group general manager of VP Visceral, Motive Studios and Star Wars at EA, began building the Motive Studio in Montreal in 2015 after departing Ubisoft.
Swift joins Raymond after spending nearly three years as a senior director at Amazon working on unannounced stuff. Before that she was the creative director of Airtight Games for about four and a half years. She started her career while still at DigiPen, where she and other grad students developed Narbacular Drop, which went on to become Portal. Gabe Newell hired her and the rest of the team to work at Valve in 2005.
Raymond got her start in the game industry as a programmer for Sony. She went on to work at Electronic Arts, then as a correspondent for The Electric Playground, and finally Ubisoft Montreal, where she was the producer of Assassin's Creed. She went on to serve as the executive producer of Assassin's Creed 2, Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist. She helped open the Ubisoft Toronto Studio and served as its managing director since 2009, helping to expand the studio from one focused on a single game to an array of titles.