Team (Red Redemption)

Team

Managing Director / CEO: Klaude Thomas

Klaude joined Red Redemption as Managing Director in 2008. Prior to that he was employed by Eidos (SCi) as Managing Director of Eidos Studios Hungary, which he established for Eidos for the purpose of delivering Battlestations: Midway and managed a studio of 40 people. Battlestations is an action-strategy game on Xbox360 and PC that charted #1 in the United Kingdom and has sold over 500,000 units. Overall, games which Klaude has been a Lead Designer, Producer or MD of have sold over 2 million units, generating a conservative estimate of $40m-$50m of turnover.

Also while at SCi he worked as Producer on Futurama and Four-Four-Two. Futurama was made under license from Matt Groening, while Four-Four-Two was made under license from the ‘4-4-2’ football magazine. Before joining Eidos (then SCi) Klaude had the pleasure of working with Creative Assembly on Mongol Invasion (a successor to Shogun: Total War) and Medieval: Total War. Previous to that he was Lead Designer on Formula One 2000, for Electronic Arts. Formula One charted #1 in Europe and was listed #6 in the Top 10 racing games of all time for PSOne. Originally from New Zealand. His first job in the UK was with Sony Psygnosis, heading a design team across multiple products.

Chairman and Communications Director: Gobion Rowlands FRSA

Gobion Rowlands co-founded Red Redemption in 2000 and was Managing Director of Red Redemption for six years before taking on the role of Chairman. Gobion is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is an Associate Lecturer of Sustainability and Communications for the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.

He has won a number of awards and grants for Red Redemption including a DTI Smart Innovation Award, 2 Defra Climate Challenge awards, a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer Award. His career has included senior production and project management roles for Lycos-Bertelsmann as Producer, Gameplay PLC as Senior Producer and Project Manager for Wireplay, and Arena Technik as Senior Producer operating the Wireplay Service. He has consulted for the UK Government e-Envoy’s office, the British Council and the Soros Foundation as well as being a games industry consultant for many years for the former UK Department of Trade and Industry.

Technical Director: Matt Harvey

Matt co-founded Red Redemption. In addition to his Technical Director role and successful completion of the Smart Innovation Award. he was Lead Developer on Steel Law Online, before taking on the technical architect role for the company. Matt has been working with Imperial College London and University College London on several HPC and visualisation resources and computational steering of numerical simulations projects (a Grid computing project). Matt was also a research associate on the combinatorial chemistry project "Discovery of new functional oxides using novel techniques".

Creative Director and Lead Games Designer: Ian Roberts

Ian Roberts has experience across a wide range of new media forms, ranging from award-winning video production and editing to 3D Graphics and website programming. These skills are combined with a background in media, film, literature and cultural research in the forms of academic study, writing, lectures and teaching. While working for Red Redemption he has been lead games designer on all of our games (including Climate Challenge and Operation: Climate Control), has produced extensive web portals including the ClimateX.org for Oxford University, directed and edited academic multi-media presentation films for University College London, and was an games industry consultant for the UK Department of Trade and Industry.

Scientific Advisor: Hannah Rowlands, MSc (Oxon), MPhys (Oxon)

Hannah Rowlands is a graduate of the Masters Degree in Environmental Change and Management at the University of Oxford, with a broad understanding of environmental and policy issues from local to global level, and an emphasis on communicating these issues to a wider audience. Her experience combines commercial, academic and charitable work. Previous work includes climateprediction.net, the world’s largest climate modelling project, in which members of the public download and run a full 3-D climate model on their personal computers, and a study of how people’s attitudes towards climate change are affected by playing computer games such as Red Redemption’s Climate Challenge Game.

Lead Developer: Sam Morris

Sam Morris is the Lead Developer for Red Redemption. He joined the company as a student intern in 2002 to work on Steel Law Online, before going on to become Lead Developer on Climate Challenge, Operation: Climate Control, Spindle and all other Red Redemption projects. Sam is a graduate in Computer Science from Manchester University, and a long time volunteer on numerous open source projects. Sam became Lead Developer on the Spindle Social Networking platform.

Developer: Robin Tregaskis

Robin joined Red Redemption in 2007 as a core team developer on the Spindle Social Networking platform. He joined us from Broner Metals Solutions Ltd where he was a Senior Software Developer for seven years on a range of international and global software products. Previous to that position, Robin worked for the computer games company Fube Industries as a Playtester and Software Developer. He originally trained as a Micro-Biologist.

Office Manager & Personal Assistant to the Chairman and MD: Amy O'Neil

Amy joined us in 2008 as Personal Assistant to Gobion and Klaude and also as Office Manager. Originally from Nebraska, Amy moved emigrated to the UK in 2005 to study for her MA in International Relations. Her thesis focussed on the Fairtrade movement. Previous to that Amy had studied film and media and had written several stageplays. Her role within Red Redemption allows her to work closely with Gobion and Klaude on a number of areas including marketing and company strategy.

Consultant and Advisory Board Chair: John Kroeger

Kroeger was co-head of the UK Government team of Business Relations Managers to the Computer Games Industry for the then Department of Trade and Industry, until June this year. He was a senior executive for Reuters Ltd in variously Denmark, Sweden and the UK for nearly twenty tears, including a period of secondment to the DTI during which he produced an Action Plan for Growth for the Digital Content Sector which led to the creation of the Digital Content Forum. It was during the creation of this plan that Mr Kroeger was also able to convince the UK government of the importance of the UK games sector and to develop ways for the government to engage with that sector.

Advisory Board Member: Dr Cameron Hepburn

Dr Cameron Hepburn is an environmental economist specialising in climate policy and long-term decision-making. He holds first class degrees in Law and Chemical Engineering from Melbourne University, an MPhil in Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford and a DPhil in Economics from Nuffield College (as a Rhodes Scholar)In addition to his teaching and research fellowships at Oxford, he is actively involved in public policy as a member of the DEFRA Academic Panel and as a founder of Vivid Economics. He contributed two background research papers to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.

Advisory Board Member & Director: Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan Rowlands is a Director of Red Redemption and was Chairman until 2008. Jonathan has had an extensive business background in public relations, marketing and promotion. His mainly entrepreneurial businesses have included sales, international music publishing, international artist management (Rod Stewart) P.R. companies ( Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck etc ), Producers Workshop Studios etc. property and a restaurant. Though technically retired, Jonathan is as busy as ever and leads a jet set lifestyle between Derbyshire and Tasmania.

Advisory Board Member: Professor Diana Liverman

As Director of the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) Diana coordinates the work of more than 100 interdisciplinary contract researchers and doctoral students who work primarily in the areas of climate, energy and ecosystems with a strong applied and policy focus. ECI hosts or co-hosts national and international projects that include the UK Climate Impacts Programme, the Oxford node of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the UK Energy Research Centre, and the ICSU Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) international project office. ECI also hosts a node of the James Martin 21st Century School for Oxford University.

Advisory Board Member: Toby Stone BA (Hons) MSt (Oxon) FRSA

Toby worked as a dot.com entrepreneur, which led to his becoming an independent policy advisor to the UK Government. He worked on government support strategies for new businesses for the DTI, Cabinet Office (Office of the e-Envoy), and with various local and regional agencies. He then went on to work as a consultant for the Soros Foundation's Business and Economic Development Program, carrying out projects across South East Europe. He worked with a number of Government and Non-governmental agencies in the region, including the British Council and Government of Serbia & Montenegro before setting up his own NGO, based primarily in Serbia. He set up and ran a property fund in the Baltics, and is now focussing on private equity and the strategic development of a number of companies in the UK and Eastern Europe.

Advisory Board Member: Michael Lehrter

Michael Lehrter was born and raised in the USA and now splits his time between his home in Austin Texas and London. He joined DELL in the late 80s and his skills in marketing, business development and management were of considerable service in helping to build the company in what was then a very entrepreneurial environment. Over the last few years Mr Lehrter has been active in the angel investing market; he helped found the angel investing group The Eyes of Texas Partners and enjoys evaluating, investing and advising start up enterprises. He recently helped fund a London based start up Moixa Energy Ltd, which has developed new rechargeable battery technology, where he is a Director. Other projects include the music documentary Before the Music Dies; Recreation Group PLC, Bynari Inc; Instant Service Inc; The Planet; Ligualcare Inc; Salvage Sale and Faith Highway.

Public Relations: Stuart Rowlands, SRMedia

For the past 30 years Stuart Rowlands has managed national and international public relations, publicity and marketing campaigns for such clients as the Nobel Peace Institute (Peace Prize, Concert & Symposium), the Quebec Tourist Board, the Government of Ghana, Anheuser Busch, Bridgestone, Chevrolet, Colgate Palmolive, Honda (both US and international), Island Records, Philip Morris, J&B Scotch; and ITT. Based in Los Angeles he is a veteran of more than 500 events in 22 countries. In addition to public relations he also produced the “Motorsports Explained” TV series which aired on ESPN and sold in 17 countries and produced, directed and wrote the syndicated weekly series “Pacific Sportsworld”. He was formerly Vice President in charge of global Public Relations for IMG, the world’s largest sports management company.

Artist and Illustrator: Jon Hodgson

Jon Hodgson is a freelance artist living in Scotland. He’s been a full time freelancer for almost ten years, working in pen and paper gaming, computer games, on-line games, and television.

He has a degree in fine art from Nottingham Trent University, but this hasn’t prevented him becoming a successful freelance artist working internationally in a wide range of fields from book jackets to story boarding, packaging art for toys to character concepts for video games. Jon worked with Red Redemption in 2007 providing character design and artwork for Operation: Climate Control.

Jon has worked on properties such as Casualty, Bob The Builder, Dungeons and Dragons, and Warhammer Historical. He is currently writing a book on creating fantasy art. You can see more of Jon’s work at the imaginatively entitled www.jonhodgson.com .