Corey Dangel has been an Art Director for 15 years. He spent the last four years establishing the visual direction for The Agency, a critically anticipated title for PC and PS3. Prior to SOE, Corey spent nearly a dozen years living the life of an elite art director in the games division of Microsoft. Focused principally on online games, Corey spent his first tour of duty working on several groundbreaking titles including the Internet Gaming Zone, Fighter Ace, and Asherons Call. A two-year hiatus sent Corey to Cavedog/Humongous Entertainment where he helped bring the Total Annihilation franchise to the online world. A return to Microsoft had him working on a variety of PC and Xbox games, most notably Dungeon Siege, Psychonauts, and Mythica. Corey attended Western Washington University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Visual Communication. Outside of work, Corey pretends to be a rock star in his circularly referential band, AgentC. He makes a fine martini, too.
For more info: LinkedIn Profile
MGS – Dungeon Siege
art direction on cruise control…
In isolation, the art direction tasks on Dungeon Siege were fairly light but given the number of tasks to juggle there was always plenty to do. In publishing you are typically covering multiple projects at the same time and I was reviewing artwork every day for Dungeon Siege, Asheron’s Call 2, Nightcaster, Psychonauts, Symphony of Light, the Raven and Rex project, and performing due diligence visits to multiple studios around the world. As our studio’s portfolio grew I eventually got to hire two assistant Art Directors, but I digress.
My main contribution to Dugeon Siege involved reviewing assets against the schedule to verify they were making progress while keeping the quality bar high. But I also provided specific critiques of the main characters (Farm Boy and Farm Girl) to Chris Taylor, reviewed marketing assets with MS marketing on a quarterly basis, gathered screenshots for ad construction on demand, brainstormed with their UI artist (John Gronquist) to bring more “life” to the interface, worked on their game map, and built an entire font based on the original Dungeon Siege logo-type. I even went so far as to create a .TTF for the display face.
release date: 2002
E3 2007 interview with Corey Dangel. 9 minutes.
