Emerging talent in the mainland is providing a platform for a specialised visual art revolution
China is a gold mine of talent for the specialised field of visual art in gaming, according to Justin Dowdeswell, a developer who brought the Mario arcade series to the soccer field in the latest generation of a popular console.
Mr Dowdeswell, 37, is general manager of a growing team at Next Level Games' year-old Beijing office. He said future offerings from the Vancouver-based company, which lists Sega, Nintendo and Activision among its clients, would feature the traditional hand-skills and digital know-how of young Beijing artists.
'It's so exciting that Next Level is in China because we have access to all this talent, said Mr Dowdeswell, a Canadian. 'Making games is about the people and not anything else [such as cost saving].'
Gaming giant Nintendo looked beyond Japan to produce a Mario game for the first time when it awarded Next Level, a leading third-party developer, the challenge of introducing the world's most loved sport to gaming's popular character set with 2004's Super Mario Strikers for the GameCube.
It was a major commercial hit and, with this year's Mario Strikers Charged for the new Nintendo Wii console, the company has proved innovation is its speciality.
The five-year-old organisation is regarded as a Triple A developer, meaning it delivers a high standard of games. It specialises in something called 'twitch' based game play, which means when you move the wireless controls in your hand you see a corresponding action on the screen, measured a fraction of a second later.
