A new video game featuring a host of
contemporary Disney Pixar characters is stretching the imagination in
leaps and bounds. With a release date set for June 2013,
Infinity promises to captivate players as they navigate a
multi-dimensional with powers unlike any other.
The game is the creation of a
talented team of artists who work at the game
development company, Avalanche in downtown Salt Lake City. Among
the team are three artists who are natives of the area and graduates
of Payson High School, Kevin Keele, Gabe Olson, and Joseph Olson.
Aside from hometowns and high school,
the trio also share in creative proclivity and childhoods
steeped in the imagination, attributes
that would bring them together to work in animation as adults. A
future cloaked in the work of super heroes seems likely, their
playtime incorporating the extraordinary. For Kevin, who was raised
in Payson, wearing a cape seemed as natural as his talent as a young
artist.
Cousins, Joseph and Gabe grew up next
door to each other in Santaquin, both engaged in caricature
sketches that drew upon local subjects
and surroundings. “I grew up drawing with and getting into trouble
next door to my cousin, Gabe,” Joe said. “He has been one of my
best friends, as far as I can
recall.
Joe and Kevin spent one year together
as students at Payson High. “I only kind of knew who he was through
several degrees of separation, but was familiar with his mad drawing
skills,” said Joe. “We started working together about ten years
ago, making games for a company that no longer exists, and have been
friends ever since.”
Joe later graduated from Brigham Young
University in Provo, Utah, with a degree in animation. “I teach at
BYU in the Animation Department in the evenings,” he said. “I
currently live in Utah with my wife, Mischele, and three beautiful
daughters.”
Though Gabe did not know Kevin when
the two were growing up in the Payson and Santaquin area, by
some unusual coincidence, he would
become familiar with his art. But this came later, during his early
college years at Utah Valley University in Orem. “I was in a
student ward and I noticed somebody in Elders Quorum drawing in his
sketchbook- I thought it was pretty rad,” he recalled. “Years
later, I remembered that same sketch after finding it on Kevin’s
art blog.”
Gabe eventually left UVU and moved to
Oregon with his wife, Catherine, where he earned an
undergraduate degree at the Art
Institute of Portland. He is currently working on a graduate degree
in
Video Game Art at the University of
Utah and resides in downtown Salt Lake City, with his beautiful wife
and set of twin children.
He joined Avalanche three years ago.
Joe has been working there since 2003. Kevin was hired a
year after Joe, and right before it was
to begin operating under the Disney Interactive company. “We
worked together at another game studio
before this one,” Kevin said.
Their work on Infinity began in 2010,
soon after the team finished the interactive video game, Toy
Story 3. “[W]e wanted to build off
the successful ideas of that game. It's changed a lot since we
started but I think we've all come up with something really
exceptional with Infinity,” Keele said.
“This game is the coolest thing I've
ever worked on,” he added. “Gabe and I have been working on the
license-specific playsets, which are
all turning out great. The incredible work Joe has been doing in the
Toybox is what sets this game apart:
the promise of a big, open playground, where you can do almost
anything you can imagine, is not just marketing hyperbole, it's real,
it works, and it's awesome! Add to that our physical toys and I think
we've got a really wonderful, high quality product. I've never worked
on a game where I've been this excited to bring it home and play it
with my kids.”
Payson Junior High School seventh
grader, Mira Windley, got to test run the game as she participated in
a job shadow assignment through her school on February 1. Gabe is her
uncle. He welcomed the Payson student into their creative field,
facilitating a visit that included a testing session involving the
new game. According to Mira, herself a gamer and beginning artist,
Infinity exceeds expectations.
“I thought it was really cool,” she
added. “I love the detail of the game and the experience was
fantastic. People will really like the game.”
