Jason Manley
Administrator
Level 12 Gladiator: Laqueatores Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 2,391
The history of MB....hmmm....this is sort of a long story...Ill try to hit it in less than a page. Each of us here will have their own slightly different version as it is a complex story. I will try to share some of it from my perspective.
I had been wanting to be a part of an independent team of artists since the days I started drawing at age 20. I thought it would be animation for tv early on but was basically clueless hehe. I ended up studying illustration and traditional art with Android, James Z, Puddn, Carl Dobsky etc...at Ringling and thought we would end up doing production traditional art someday...but had no idea where we were headed truthfully. I wanted more than anything for there to be a solution. I wanted to work with other artists on cool interesting stuff. That was the main thing on my mind. I wanted to know the craft of art. Biz had to be learned too. Somehow. shortly there after, most of the guys I knew who were any good, ended up doing concept art for games.
We all went seperate directions company/career wise and from time to time we would meet another who fit well into our group in terms of talent and personality. If everyone loved them, they were brought in like brothers...or sisters creatively. We all wanted to learn from each other. This had nothing to do with biz. It was purely respect for person and talent that kept us close. One of the first key industry guys who fit well with us, artistically and inspirationally and personally, was el coro. I met him on a job interview with Shaba years ago and his sketchbooks blew my mind...i installed painter on his machine that day and gave him a demo...a little rembrandt portrait thing from memory I think. he took me out and schooled me by painting a three foot long canvas in oil of the harbor while i made a four by six inch image in watercolor. Point is, we had immediate respect. I knew andrew and the others were going to fukkin love the guy.
Conceptart.org was an idea that I floated about after working with a great team of guys at Black Isle Studios. I had since moved on to a smaller studio and was doing a ton of 3d art and was one of two painters in the building. I missed having a team of painters to learn from like we had at BIS. I had wanted to get coro and james and andrew together badly (for learning particularily) and they all had a little interest in checking out each others work.
I announced the site on one of Black Isle's news/fan sites and got busy with games work..forgetting all about it. I went back and checked the ca site, once i remembered, and the web counter showed a few thousand people had come to check out what I had up...absolutely NOTHING. I called andrew, called coro, called puddn, james, and the others and they sent me work and supported the community and gallery idea. I designed the simple site, had a friend put it up and Pontemont kindly set up the forums. Ponte ran the news site which conceptart.org was first announced on. Anyhow...what I wanted to do happened. We all got together and started seriously learning together. I no longer felt isolated from artists with similar interests. Ideas were being exchanged quickly. We wanted to make the most organized and easy place to learn about art on the net. We wanted to meet more pro's, and we wanted to help others. In exchange, we would all get better at our craft.
Eventually, we learned enough with each other as colleagues that trust was built. Coro and Andrew and the others became close. (not that close! haha) At the time, my work was fairly well known in games and I began to get more and more contract work wich fortunately, the companies I worked for at the time, gave me permission to do. Since I could not always get all of it done myself, I began to work with Coro, James, and the others in our spare time. Work kept coming, we kept cranking and getting jobs done. By the time we picked up Microsoft, Atari, and a few other big name studios (Thanks to Black Isle marketing my art and name previously), everyone knew we would have freelance regularily. We began to learn the art of promotion.
At that point, I had decided to work with a big pub in Boston. The game developer there, which is now closed, was the most horribly run place I had ever seen. The team was for the most part, clueless. New management had no games experience and huge ego's, the company burn rate was sky high and nothing was getting done. The Senior Producer there early on, had understood that I could put together a team as I had helped build two art teams previously and had built a solid network. I had tried to get james, coro, and andrew up to Boston with me to head up the staff for the new project, but no one had any interest in moving to Beantown. (I couldn't blame them as I was living there myself. haha)
During my convincing of coro...or lack of...to join me in Boston and put teams together...i realized that there was no way we should all get together to work in a company that would eventually jade every one of us. Most games studios stick around only a handful of years and if we were going to do something we better be sure it is our own. Coro's exact words were: "dood, you know I've got your back!"...I called James...he said the same thing...I called Andrew....he said the same. Within days Coro calls me and says "you aint gonna believe this shit...Petey Konig is interested in banding up with us". To hear that a the backbone of a major fx studio in film was willing to step away from a 13 year gig with a list of movies that barely fit on a page, sculpture, animation, 3d, and direction experience...That is when things got exciting. Fortunately, the company in Boston started to smell like it was going down the tubes. (for example: their lease date ended on their release date. OUCH!). Morale there was beyond low there. I knew it was time to get out and make it on our own. This was the opportunity.
I spent my nights preparing lists of biz stuff that had to be done. The guys got brainstorming together. We realized it was all going to happen. Within days Coro called me again and said his old friend Chris Hatala, animating at Weta, called and said "you guys are working for who? how the hell are you doing that? I'd totally be down". And thats when we realized that we were going to be more than just a concept design studio. We had two of the top animators on the planet in our group with reels like none we had seen. We were stoked.At that time, Andrew and Coro pointed out that we should do all of it...modeling, texturing, concept, animation, and even entire game titles...we had the beginnings of what we believed was one of the most talented teams existing in games and deep enough connections to make it happen...a few days later, we added Ed Quintero (to lead on textures...he did the sentinels etc...) through Chris Hatala (coro, chris, and ed all went to the Acad of Art together but had gone off and achieved success at other studios, and Petey is who got Coro his job in games). With the trust that stemmed from our history as a group, we knew we could all create just fine as a team. Most of us worked together in the past..coro with petey on sculptures/concept...me coro andrew james on CA and freelance...hatala and ed...petey and hatala on films....we knew we understood pipeline as a group and were compatible personality wise. The next choice was obvious. We needed a new company name, all biz set up, and accounting proper as quickly as possible.
I knew we could take a good chunk of the outsourcing work since 95 percent of outsourcing that was being done all came back to the studios looking like shit. Teams were often upset that the projects they were pooring crunchtime hours into, sacreficing their life for...were being given to studios who didn't care about it at all...no matter how pro they said they were. To be honest, I had not once seen anyone have a great experience with outsourcing even though the industry was leaning so heavily toward doing more of it. This being discussed between us, made the decision clear. The games industry needed a high-end outsourcing studio made up of top tier artists to help them prepare for next-gen titles. Our timing could not have been better.
We proved to each other we could do the work, get the clients, have unified vision as a team, and were entirely united behind the ideas. We simply needed to go out and get the work through our network (built from years working in entertainment) to make it happen...not as easy as it sounds, believe me. We made a list of ten dream companies (id, sony, activision, blizzard, etc...) we wanted as clients and started there. As of a year ago, we had every client in here working with us whom was on the list but one...Bungie...though we picked up Wideload who founded Bungie so maybe that half counts. That list has since grown.
We went through many candidates for 3d and Programming and eventually started to build the team. I hired a competent biz lawyer, games lawyer, and accounting team, and brand designer/web guru on retainer for six k or there abouts...these being some of the meager profits we had made helping on previous projects. The money came from our own work. We wanted independence. No investors, no reliance on any one publisher for funding (often the doom of the independent..hard to be so when you are dependent right?), no publisher meddling on our own titles, etc...were some things we wanted moving forward.
I left my cushy job and it was like sunrise inspirationally. Everything was ahead of us. I put together the biz plan in my head which was spread over about three years of time. (one should write it down but it was entirely clear to me after so much thought, discussion and help from the guys). I was obsessed. I set goals, built a marketing plan (also in my head), got the branding done, got the biz stuff done to run the company...brought in work...began discussions with potential clients...took every gig that came my way. Slowly more jobs came in, more clients...and we began to move forward. We pushed months ahead of schedule on the biz plans goals. Everyone worked hard.
The others eventually left their day jobs and we were functioning exactly as we had hoped..an entirely remote team of developers working together over the net using project tracking forums, IM, cel phones, etc...for big name clients. That is when things got a little hectic as we got our name out and projects began to roll. Some of us were working on this stuff, doing workshops, living life, and sleeping very little in order to get it all done well and proper.During the first year, I spent a lot of time recruiting, training, and building up the 3d crew. All the shareholders in MB and the peeps we added to the group worked their ass off to prepare, create, and hit deadlines. Slowly the 3d staff got started on projects for various companies we developed strong relations with. Flagship Studios title Hellgate:London was a major help here. The guys at Flagship have been supportive and as good of a client as we could hope for. During our time of growth, they were doing exactly the same thing. They have been awesome at keeping us busy on fun stuff..especially early on when we needed projects in order to move forward. We have been fortunate to pick up so many clients since the early days. The games industry is small. Respect is earned. Earning respect took time and hard work. We had no choice but to try.
As we worked our way through larger projects, it became clear that creating remotely was not a viable solution. We had to have the team together. We were mostly divided between Austin and SF but made the decision to relocate the studio. Since then, it has been a fast ride and a ton of hard work. Over the course of the past three years, we went from a group of three to a team of over 50 worldwide and are expanding. Not bad, for a bunch of artists with no biz degrees right? We have worked on 35 titles thus far and have three or four more coming in now. we are moving on to our 28th major client and just finished solidifying the nxt years plans. James Z has brought our vision of having a studio in Shanghai to a reality, helped with biz, financials, creating the client database, and McCarthy finished building and putting together our stellar 3d team which now runs for the most part, on it's own. Melissa Lee has been a big help too. I should say that everyone at mb now is key. They are all important to the group and it's success.
I am sure the guys would have a ton to add from this. Everyone, especially andrew, coro, james, petey, ed, mccarthy, hatala and the team have been entirely instrumental in this. MB is here because of the group, our leads, the great team, this community...and hard work. If one of us had been missing from the team, we would be nowhere near where we are now and would not be moving forward as quickly as we are. I am thankful to have such great friends and to be a part of the best team I have ever worked with. We all are. Everyone on the team is a bigtime player here.
Thank god it is almost time for xmas vacation. I have not had a week away from work in a long long long long time. This year, I am looking forward to it. Everything is up and running strong.
Best,
JM
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Jason Manley
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Last edited by Jason Manley : December 7th, 2005 at 07:30 PM.
(December 16, 2005)
