Sumo Digital 22.01.2014
Darren Mills, one of the four original founders of the digital company Sumo located in Sheffield, England is now working along side 200+ employees making the joyful games we all know and love. The story began in 2003, Sumo digital started off as a tiny 4 members, all of which were programmers and artists working on minor jobs that were available as and when they came. And as the years have passed the company has thrived along side the gaming industry and expanded to having a base in India with 40 extra artists as well as the enormous team already located in Sheffield with members from all over the world. With the occasional large project the company do take on freelance employees for those extra pairs of hands when times get tough. However these employees are only temporary until the project is complete. The latest platforms in which Sumo have developed games for are the Xbox one, and PlayStation four. But they have a large portfolio when it comes to their variation of platforms as they have developed games for consoles such as Nintendo DS, Wii, PlayStation3, Xbox 360, and android apps. So far the company has an impressive list of 40+ games which they have proudly developed, and even taken IP's (international Properties) and expanded on them for instance, Sonic. The games they have developed have been successful in the sense that they have won awards for many of their games; Sonic All-Stars Racing won the best racing game of the year and Xbox Fitness for the Xbox One platform won the best fitness title, and many more.
Sumo is successful in the fact that as a company they have their own specific tools and software to develop their games in house where as smaller, not as successful businesses, would not. The software the company use to develop these games differ for the specific areas in the development for the games. The art teams use 3D studio Macs for modelling, MIA and Zed brush software, where as the programmers use C++ for the coding for the games.
Their first launch title for the PSP was the beginning for the company as from then on they have worked with Microsoft, Sony and triple A partners developing games. However the major breakthrough for the company was the opportunity to develop OutRun2 which was released onto the Xbox platform. As this occurred when the company was only small, a minor team of 20 worked along side Sega Japan to create and develop this game and used Sega's tools and code base and since the success of the game Sega has been working along side Sumo Digital now for the past 10 years.
However the most impressing products of the company, with the popular titles such as Little Big Planet for Sony on the PSP with psvita multiscreen gameplay, and the number 1 best selling game for Nintendo Ds; Moshi monsters which was released for the 3DS was finished after only 6 months with the small team of 25 people.
There are 3 main teams in the Sumo Digital company. The Artists, The designers and The Programmers. Each team has around 7 areas in which people specify in for example, in the artists team there are; Concept artists, Character Artists, Environment Artists, Animators, Graphic artists, Technical artists and the Lead artists. The categories differ for each individual team however the structure remains the same, there are managers of the teams who are responsible for everyone within it. All areas of the company are important and the games could not be developed without them and together the they make Sumo Digital.
