My name is Jake Johnson and I am the Senior Environment Artist at FireSky and my life has been very interesting. I grew up all over the US…moving back and forth from state to state due to my mother’s job. I usually say that I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, because I was born in Hayward CA. I call Castro Valley CA home because it’s where we always seemed to end up.

I have always loved to draw and create from my imagination. Expressing my thoughts into art is how I communicated my feelings toward life, and others. I found my self loving comic books, not really for the stories or the super heroes, but for the art style. I loved looking at Superman comics and trying to draw the characters on my own. I really didn’t know how to construct a character from scratch, so I would always trace the pages, taping the book on a window and using the light passing through as a light table. I soon grew past the comical super hero stage and moved into more mature themed comic books. I loved Dark Horse and Chaos comics. My favorite was Alien and Evil Ernie. I grew into drawing realistic creatures pretty fast. I would go to the library and check out books on how to draw. I always loved watching scary movies; I would enjoy pressing pause to draw the creatures, sometimes mixing and matching parts to create my own interpretation.

Over the years I dabbed into many mediums of art; painting, photography, and sculpture. In High School, I was a shop nut. Always working on cars and building things with wood and metal. It wasn’t long before I discovered welding, and I loved it! Soon I began making things in the shop out of molten steel and casting small sculptures from sand molds. I got involved with an off campus program offered to juniors who were interested in learning a trade skill. Of course I choose welding! I wanted to become a sculptor, making the huge structures you sometimes see in front of office buildings and in parks. After two years of taking this welding course, and graduating top of my class, I was well on my way to becoming what I wanted to be. But that’s not how it turned out after all. I soon realized that I was not living up to my true potential. So I decided a week before High School graduation to move to Monterey CA. From there I dabbed into computers and graphic arts, finding myself creating little slogans and logos. I soon wanted to become a graphic artist. I was searching for a creative outlet for all of my ideas. And I thought that this would be a great way to communicate my ideas to the world. So I enrolled into ITT Technical Institute in Hayward CA, taking courses in Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as HTML editing programs.

It wasn’t before long that I realized that being a graphic artist was too limiting in creativity for me. I looked into other colleges and found an art school here in Phoenix AZ. The Art Institute is where I made my home. I enrolled in their Game Art and Design program, wanting to become a concept artist.

I spent the next year learning and studying art styles and techniques to become more like my inspiration at the time. I went through many phases of art. First I wanted to be a concept artist, but I soon found out that everyone I met at the school wanted to be one as well. So I got introduced into the 3D world by some guys I had met. And from there on the rest was history. I found an unlimited medium for my creativity. I started character modeling pretty fast, but something was still missing for me. Character modeling appeared not to be what I had in mind; I felt it was too static for me.

While in college I would play games on my computer; but not to play them through as fast as I could. I would always look at the environments and see how they were constructed and built. It was intriguing, and I was engrossed at the level of exploration that I could encounter. That’s it, I found my calling. I found my love for environment art half way through my college career. I was soon learning the Unreal editor and making levels and environments of my own. I was heavily involved in online forums, constantly showing my work to other professionals and seeking their creative input on my work. I actually think I learned more from doing tutorials on my own then I ever did attending classes in college. So I decided to just stop going…just kidding!

After college I got a job offer from Nintendo and moved to Austin Texas to work with Todd Keller and Andrew Jones on Metroid Prime 3, at Retro Studios. When I first started I was in awe of the talent there at the studio. I learned more in my time there then I ever did in college. After Metroid it was time for me to head out so I was told about the project that was in preproduction at the time at Firesky, and I was very interested. Soon after my inquiry I got a job offer from them and I loaded up my car and headed out. So now I’m here, and it’s been a blast. Working with Unreal3 has been amazing. It’s hard to explain, but no one can tell you what making a game is like until you have been there. A lot of hard work and long hours go into these art pieces. And I am very glad to be a part of this creative industry.

I am a Transylvanian immigrant and have lived in Tempe most of my life. I went to the Art Institute of Phoenix after high school and from there went on to work at Cinematix Studios for a short while before they moved to Korea. After that, I did websites and things for about 6 years and then did some CAD for a residential electrical contractor after which I would end up coming to FireSky.

To pass the time I enjoy watching T.V and was in a failed rock band for about a year. My favorite video game would be the Final Fantasy series and my favorite movie would be The Empire Strikes Back. Of all the Stargate series Atlantis is my favorite, and as far as the worst movie I have ever seen that would have to be Lost in Translation. I am illiterate so I don’t have any favorite books.

Here at Firesky I am responsible for implementing the character animations into the game.

I grew up in Prescott Arizona where I spent most of my free time drawing, painting and reading comic books. My High School art teacher Mr. Murphy suggested I choose art as a career.  So with his encouragement I attended the Art Institute of Phoenix. 

I landed my first game job at Cinematix Studios with the help of my friends from AI. The first game I ever worked on was called Revenant as a multi player designer... it was fun times. After that, I went to Fox Animation Studios where I was lucky enough to do digital ink and paint for the film Titan A.E. After the closure of Fox Animation :( I got the chance to work for Rainbow Studios. While I was there I had the amazing opportunity to work on various television and video game projects. Some of the highlights were ATV Offroad Fury, Splashdown, Cars 360, Donner, and Britney’s Dance Beat =D ! I was part of the Animation division which was closed down shortly after Rainbow was acquired by THQ :( . I went to work at Realm Interactive on a game called Exarch which would later have its name changed to Dungeon Runners by the time it came out. I spent some more time at Rainbow for a while then came over to Firesky. So if you were able to follow all of that good job because I can barely follow it all myself :)

Here at FireSky I help with character work making things look pretty. My favorite games are Starcraft and Rockband, and I also enjoy watching TV and taking naps. The End.

aka Fringeworthy in Stargate Resistance. One of the founders of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

I was a Star Trek junkie at age 5, and a Star Wars addict at age 7, when the first movie came out. My favorite activity was drawing pictures and building models of space ships and playing with electronics kits, until I got my first Atari video game console in 1980. Computers took over, and in a few years, between junior high programming classes and dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons, I was coming home from school every day to play with my Commodore 64 all night. A few years later, I met Harlan Brown, and learned how to write screenplays, which were mostly Star Trek: The Next Generation fan fiction (although I will always say our episodes were superior to the ones that were produced.) Being complete Star Trek geeks, Harlan and I created a never-completed manuscript inspired by Warships of the US Navy, called Ships of Starfleet, where he wrote the articles and I drew the "photos." I must have made over a hundred pictures in over three years, which was a great diversion from life in the retail world, and sustained my geeky heart.

Already into the BBS scene in the early '90s, computers started to get really interesting by '94 when Doom and the World Wide Web started to catch on, and I discovered that I was very good at Photoshop. I was sick to death of running a cash register, so I taught myself to code HTML, and got a job doing it, specializing in the artistic side, because web pages were spectacularly ugly back then. Eventually, that led to other jobs doing Flash animation, graphic design, and building 3D models for video games. I even built a super-detailed 3D model of the classic USS Enterprise in my spare time that my 5-year-old self would have thought was totally excellent.

When I first heard about the TV series Stargate SG-1, I dismissed it, because I thought the movie was an bald insult to the audience's intelligence, and a TV series based on it could only be a stupid waste of time. But by about 2000, I clued into the show, and before too long it roused my inner geek. In 2001, while floating ideas for a video game project, myself, Harlan Brown, and Todd Ellering had a concept for an MMO based on Stargate SG-1, Stargate Worlds. We spent the next few years trying to figure out how to raise money to fund our idea, taking advantage of the extended time to refine our game design, and after we got it together, in 2005 we finally founded Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment to create the project. The rest is history (or Shakespearian drama), with more yet to be written.

I'm also the guy who built this website.

Mike is an environment and technical artist for the studio, with some of his earlier work for the team in heavy rigging and animation as well as digging into the guts of both the Hero and Unreal engines.  He has been in industry for two years, a fairly recent graduate from the Guildhall at SMU in 2007 with a Masters of Interactive Technology.  Prior to that he was in the Air Force for three years, stationed at Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany.  He received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2001.

Currently playing 360 & PC as much as is humanly possible outside of work, but food and sleep seem to keep getting in the way.