Hey everyone — this week's guest is Jamie Smith, and honestly, it’s another one of my favourite conversations I’ve recorded. We'd never met before we jumped on mic, and within minutes it felt like catching up with someone who'd walked a road very close to mine.

Jamie grew up in Middlesbrough thinking games were simply magic — no idea a person had made them, let alone that studios were sitting on his doorstep the whole time. He talks through the panel of industry judges who tore his pitch apart, the internship that came from going back and fixing it anyway, and the run through Reflections, Ubisoft, EA, Sumo, People Can Fly and Behaviour that followed. What stuck with me most, though, is how little he's chasing these days. Not the title, not the next big genre — just adding value, day to day, and putting his health ahead of the rest.

We also get into why a shooter should feel good to miss, why he handed over a lead role without a fight, and why he now plays golf games instead of forty-hour open-world epics. Full conversation is below.

Alex (00:00)
Thanks for being on the podcast, Jamie — we've never met before, so I'm meeting you live as we do this. You've got a great history, and I'm excited to dig into some games I love that you've worked on. But I always kick this off with my favourite first question: what first inspired you about video games?

Jamie Smith (00:18)
I'm old enough to recognise the Sega Master System as my first console, so I'm an early-nineties kind of kid. The way I'd describe it is not knowing that games were made by people — when I used to switch the console on, magic just appeared on the screen. It's only when you watch something like Jurassic Park and see the name Steven Spielberg at the front of it — the guy who also did E.T. — that it starts to click. The Sega logo, the Japanese name, I'd seen it before, but it was just the notion that you flick this button, or flip the RF switch depending on your age.

I used to have tons of games at a time when genres barely existed as a concept — you switch it on and play Streets of Rage, then Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It was almost like a treasure trove. I mention the Master System because this was the era when the Mega Drive was out, but the Master System already had a huge backlog of games and was much cheaper. That's what my parents got me when I was four or five, and that's what got me into games as a hobby, prior to a career.

Alex (01:47)
Right, okay — so it was that magic of being able to turn this box on and play all these wondrous worlds that drew you in in the first place?

Jamie Smith (01:57)
Exactly, yeah. There's a whole mix of them — some forgotten by now, but there's a really good one called Black Belt. My dad in particular was really into seventies martial arts — Bruce Lee, then Rocky, then Karate Kid. So you'd flick this button and effectively be playing as Daniel LaRusso, a pseudo Bruce Lee, with two buttons and one analogue stick on the Master System. I just understood it as magic — I didn't know there was code, sprites, pixels, it was just this picture you could manipulate, and it was always interesting to me. There were light guns too, a really good game called Rescue Mission. I ended up with this whole treasure trove of stuff, and it wasn't always good — different levels of quality — but I don't think that crossed my mind at that age.

Alex (02:57)
Yeah, I get you. And a good time to jump into the Master System, because a lot of games that were on the Mega Drive, you got to play there too, and there was a big library of Sega arcade games. So — where did you grow up?

Jamie Smith (03:13)
Yes, I'm from the northeast of the UK. There are multiple games hubs around the UK — people will be familiar with Guildford, Leamington Spa, and more recently Brighton. In the northeast, historically there's been Acclaim, Midway, and Ubisoft Reflections is still around. I grew up in a town called Middlesbrough, unbeknownst to me that there was games industry on my doorstep — it's only later in life I discovered that. It's more of a working-class area; Middlesbrough itself, aside from the football team, is known historically for industry and steel works. It's basically a shipbuilding town historically.

Alex (04:04)
And did you grow up with any other gamers in the family — brothers, sisters, anyone into games?

Jamie Smith (04:10)
Just one sister, slightly younger, but family friends too, and some cousins. Even though I owned a Master System, they were the big kids who had the PlayStation or the SNES. Actually, the advertising for Sega at the time was that you're the older, cooler kid if you played Sega — I was the perfect target audience, because that's exactly what I had: family friends who were twelve, thirteen, fourteen when I was five, six, seven. My sister's a year younger, so she didn't play much, but I had role models in those family friends who'd play Mortal Kombat, or whatever you weren't supposed to play at that time.

Alex (05:00)
So video games were aspirational as well — you wanted to be one of the big kids, getting to play the big games?

Jamie Smith (05:06)
Exactly, yeah. Having the Master System came from an era where eight-bit and sixteen-bit games were completely different from each other — but there was always that sense of, what are these older kids playing? As they moved onto the PlayStation, everybody's playing Tekken, we don't need this 2D stuff anymore, everybody's playing 3D. It was aspirational — they've got the next cool thing.

Alex (05:30)
Right, that makes sense. When did the idea of making video games occur to you — was that early or late, and what triggered it?

Jamie Smith (05:42)
It's probably a combination of three or four things. GamesMaster on TV was a pretty prominent show on Channel 4 in the nineties, and I was a regular viewer — just seeing it on the big screen was cool enough as a hobby in itself. I found out later in life that game studios were within a stone's throw of where I grew up, partly through GamesMaster magazine, which used to run little snippets on local studios — "here's a guy who works for Rare, here's how he got a job as a tester; here's a guy from Rockstar, here's how he became an artist." The third piece was that the local university had a course called Creative Visualization — a 3D modelling course on Silicon Graphics machines — and a lot of people from that course went on to work at Codemasters on the touring car games, Colin McRae and that kind of thing. So it's on the TV, it's in a games magazine, it's on my doorstep, and it's at a local university. It probably wasn't until GTA III released — maybe 2001 — that I started considering this as an actual career I could follow. I say GTA III specifically because at that time, if I had a dream game in my head of what you could make, it would be that: a big open-world game, the promise of freedom. I was really into gangster films then too, so there was a Martin Scorsese kind of influence on it as well. I followed a college course and a university course which, long story short, led to my first role in the industry.

Alex (07:46)
Right, yeah — so is that what took you to Cleveland College of Art and Design, and then on to Teesside? Was it that combination of those two colleges?

Jamie Smith (07:52)
Yeah, that's it. One claim to fame I'll always throw out — Cleveland College of Art and Design is the same college Ridley Scott went to, about fifty years before me. It's a northeastern college of art and design, for film, media, transport design — a generalist design college, not just games, with a base in Hartlepool. The industry in the area — shipbuilding, ironworks — is also the origin of the Blade Runner skyline, from Ridley Scott's memory of the area. I applied to a generalist 3D design course — more like architecture, exhibition design, furniture design, a lot of woodwork in a workshop, but also 3D modelling in 3ds Max. That put me a year or two ahead of the other students by the time I joined university, also on my doorstep — already familiar with props, segments, Booleans, all the usual 3D tools stuff. The university had that same Creative Visualization course, which soon became a game design course. And it comes full circle, because some of the people from the studios I mentioned earlier — Acclaim, Reflections, Midway — had aged out of the industry and fed back into the university as lecturers.

Alex (09:56)
Right, fascinating. Because you started at A level — AS level was fine art and sculpture — and then went into the art and design course with 3D design in it. What triggered that? Was there a point you were thinking sculpture or fine art rather than games, or was that just the course you took?

Jamie Smith (10:17)
It was more to do with the course than a deliberate choice. Because it was a dedicated creative course, we didn't get taught STEM subjects — science, English, maths. So my day-to-day bread and butter was 3D design, more like car design skills, with a supplementary course to cover what we were missing on the STEM side. But there was also a secondary A level you could do, which was sculpture — looking at classic and contemporary artists doing interesting things. We'd look at Giacometti for sculpture, Rachel Whiteread, who does a lot with negative space, Calatrava for famous architecture, and we'd make something in the style of those artists, but at a much smaller scale. It wasn't really a choice — it was part of the course. You do 3D design, but you have to supplement it with these other things too.

Alex (11:27)
Got it. But it sounds like a really interesting background in spatial design — metrics, dimensions, physical spaces. A really interesting feeder into level design and that side of game design.

Jamie Smith (11:44)
Yeah, and because it was a generalist 3D design course, it covered everything from the smallest to the biggest scale — you might be handcrafting a piece of jewelry, hand-sized, but also considering an exhibition space that could exist at E3, something much larger than life. One friend from that course ended up in product design, has his own furniture workshop making industrial design objects. Another friend ended up in interior design, doing window dressing for UK shops like BHS and House of Fraser. All from the same course.

Alex (12:30)
From the same course, right. It gave you a good grounding across a lot of different angles. But you went the video game route and got a head start at Teesside, then went on to that game design course. Was that course founded while you were there?

Jamie Smith (12:48)
Yes, I think it first manifested in the early 2000s. I first came across it through a summer course while I was still at school — you could go to the university for a couple of weeks and use 3ds Max to model something like an aeroplane, the simplest object, just a cylinder with tapered edges. They also had the classic VR labs — almost like a giant hollowed-out golf ball — using it to showcase how you could take 3D objects, put them in 3D space, and sit almost inside a cinema screen to see them come to life. That was how they showcased the technology to prospective students. By the time I joined, mid-2000s, maybe 2005-ish, it was 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop, the Creative Suite, UDK — one of the earlier versions of Unreal — and maybe one of the early versions of GameMaker and Unity. That was the core suite of tools we had available.

Alex (14:04)
Okay, interesting — so it gave you a good grounding on the tool side of making games, not just the theory side. So you spent a few years at Teesside, and then it looks like you went basically straight from college into a role at Reflections.

Jamie Smith (14:24)
Yeah, that's it. I was at university for three years, hopeful of getting a job, but this was the mid-2000s — 2008, when the big financial crash happened. Before that, university courses were either three years or four years with a sandwich year — a year in industry, then back to finish the third year. Because of the crash, those sandwich placements were off the table. I did the three-year course, completed it fine, but was coming into a very competitive market — some projects downsizing, some teams changing. Around that time Red Dead Redemption came out, and within a couple of weeks Bizarre Creations and BlackRock Studio, this was about 2009, some UK studios started to fall. That was the climate when I got a job. I was pretty fortunate in how it happened — there was an event at the university, more like a Dragon's Den style thing, where you'd present an idea within a certain framework to a bunch of industry peers, and they'd choose the best one. On the other side of the table were four very challenging judges — I won't go through their feedback — but one of them, quite generous with his time, came back three or four months later, after I'd addressed some of the feedback, and was really interested in the idea and the changes I'd made — a second bite of the cherry. He picked me up for an intern opportunity at Reflections.

Alex (16:23)
Wow.

Jamie Smith (16:24)
And I've basically been in games ever since.

Alex (16:26)
That's amazing — what a great opportunity. It sounds like you grabbed it with both hands by actually addressing that feedback and taking action. How did that feel? What was that moment like?

Jamie Smith (16:40)
Yeah, it was great at the time, because I felt like I'd put a lot into the course — I was always available, diligent, hitting milestones, getting good grades. So on one side it felt like, you've earned this because you've worked hard. But there's also luck meeting opportunity — if I hadn't put myself in that place, or if he hadn't turned up that particular day, or if I hadn't addressed the feedback from that event. I won't go through the feedback itself, but one of the judges on the other side of the table was from Eidos, and I later found out that era of Eidos was one of the most competitive and hostile in terms of feedback. It was a bit like a red rag to a bull — "you shouldn't do this, and here's all the reasons why it's a bad idea, you should change it." So that was that. It was serendipitous, but it also vindicated the effort I'd put in. I was very lucky, but I did work hard for it too.

Alex (17:51)
Yeah, you earned it but nonetheless it still had to all fall into place for it to pay off — absolutely.

Jamie Smith (17:55)
Exactly, yeah — the stars aligned, basically.

Alex (17:58)
And it sounds like a great baptism of fire — you put a lot of work into that idea, then you've got to stand in front of industry veterans and get a grilling, and weather that, and still come back from it. Iron sharpens iron. That's pretty cool.

Jamie Smith (18:17)
Yeah, exactly. I'm a big football fan, and it's a bit like when people come into football and have to clean the boots, earn their stripes as a YTS, a new person coming into the industry. I was glad I had that early, rather than later on.

Alex (18:35)
Yeah, definitely — it gives you a good level of perspective. So you get a six-month contract as a junior game designer on Driver: San Francisco — love that game. Reflections is a storied studio with a fantastic history, and you're walking in to work on a big franchise. How did you handle that?

Jamie Smith (19:00)
Yeah, it was fantastic. I'm in the northeast, but this was fifty miles from home — probably the first time I'd properly flown the nest, having been at university and college close to home. It was a pretty big team, over a hundred people at the time. The project had been in development for several years, in full production with no sight of the end — I didn't know that at the time, but that was the context. The first couple of days, the design team was fantastic across the board — still one of the strongest I've ever worked in; they're all principals, directors and leads all over the country now. I'd go for a coffee and chat to the guy who designed the Driver 1 garage mission. And if you weren't good enough, you don't get to play the game — that was the context. In some ways you get to meet your heroes: I'd tell them I was playing that game with my uncle fifteen years ago, and they couldn't believe someone was now old enough to be in the industry. They gave me a lot of rope to try different things — car mechanics, mission design, helping on the multiplayer team, temporary QA, achievements. Lots of piecemeal work, but I was eating it up because it was all new to me. Later in my career I got heavy into spreadsheets for system design, and this project showed me the difference between having a spreadsheet on a project and not, for game balance and progression. Overall, almost entirely good memories — a fantastic time.

Alex (21:18)
It sounds like you got a really broad understanding of design — they didn't pigeonhole you into one thing. From those six months, was there anything where you thought, that's what I want to do, that's the part of design I love? Or did you just love all of it?

Jamie Smith (21:44)
Good question. I liked a bit of everything, mostly out of the awe of getting to live my dream, working in games. But the things I gravitated towards were what I call the three Cs — moment-to-moment stuff, camera, controls, characters. I was involved with a lot of the car mechanics — abilities like boost, ram, teleport back and slam into things — and placing jumps around the world and doing some mission work. Anything more moment-to-moment, I gravitated towards — you pick up the pad, slam into a car, the pad rumbles, the screen shakes. That was immediate to me, the visceral nature of the feel of things, and that led into what I did further on in my career. There was also collaboration with other teams — helping the environment team with placement of objects, how it feels to smash through barrels or boxes, and on the multiplayer side, how to make the car feel satisfying moving fast in and out of traffic, so there wasn't a disparity between single player and multiplayer.

Alex (23:19)
Right into game feel and the three Cs, straight away. Do you feel like you were prepared for that, that you'd learned things that helped, or was it just instinctual?

Jamie Smith (23:39)
No — it's a bit like learning to drive, you don't really learn until you're out on the main roads. Whatever I thought I knew about game design, it was more a case of finding out what I didn't know. Going back to the spreadsheet example — I'd always done design documents as a PowerPoint overview and big, lengthy Word documents. Actually, no — you just need four or five variables highlighted in a spreadsheet with some good formulas, and combined with game feel and hands-on-the-pad experience, you can iterate really quickly. The power of a spreadsheet, the power of being able to make a change, test it, make a change, test it — the scientific method — that was a big eye-opener. But also, sometimes a designer would come along and ask, "did you think about this?" I'm a big fan of measure twice, cut once, so as they started asking those kinds of questions, within a fairly short time I was answering them before they asked. Thinking one step ahead — have we considered all the angles someone might factor in.

Alex (25:05)
Interesting — sounds like you took to it like a duck to water. And fifty miles is still a distance — you've moved away. That's scary, because you had no guarantee it would turn into anything permanent.

Jamie Smith (25:24)
Yeah, exactly. The original opportunity was a six-month internship, and after that it was, do we know if the project's getting extended, is there enough work to go around for the team? That went on for maybe just over a year — thirteen or fourteen months of a six-month contract, then a three-month contract, then a two-month contract, and so on — always wondering, is this going to get made permanent, do I have a job after this? Even if it hadn't panned out, I'd have been grateful for the opportunity, but I'd have been back at square one in that post-2008 climate, with layoffs and other game designers on the market. All I could really do was show up and do my best work every day. My habits as a designer and as a gamer have changed a lot since then, but at the time I was just diligent and fortunate, trying to keep my head down and add value every day.

Alex (26:34)
Sounds very similar to your approach to the college course — just do the best work you can, show up, work hard, and cross your fingers.

Jamie Smith (26:42)
Exactly that, yeah. You can't control what you can't control.

Alex (26:47)
And so it does happen — you go full time, working your way through as a game designer. I'm curious about the acting lead game designer role you had for a short period — how did you approach that, and how challenging was it to leave a mark while just acting in the role?

Jamie Smith (27:09)
Yeah, that was on The Crew, my second project — a brand new IP, and I joined in what I'd call pre-production. The brief was a giant open world based on a small-scale version of the US — we'd made the top right corner, Philadelphia, just north of New York, Detroit, that kind of area. They wanted the world populated full of content — starting with Detroit, lots of content for race missions, jumps, drifts, the kind of gameplay you'd see in something like Forza Horizon now; The Crew was doing something similar back then. I defined the workflows for how we'd introduce this content to players — you could interact with it on the move, drive through and it would automatically trigger, no button needed — and set up a master document of best practices for how to set it up, check it in, review it. I was then involved in hiring two level designers who picked up the baton to populate the rest of America — if I'd done the top right corner, they did the remaining three quarters. That acting lead role came from being the de facto lead on the project despite being the only designer until we hired those two, with nobody else experienced in the studio to take the mantle. So I went from introducing content to reviewing it, defining standards, and talking to stakeholders based in Lyon — the studio that made The Crew is the same team that did Test Drive Unlimited, so they were effectively doing this for the second or third time. I'd go over to Ivory Tower in Lyon to communicate the changes we'd made — take on a new feature, define what it was going to be, then offload it to others. That was the big cycle.

Alex (29:33)
That's fascinating — sounds like a pivotal job, especially on a cross-studio project, which is much more common now, though Ubisoft were probably at the forefront of it. How did you navigate transitioning away from being the de facto lead — I presume another lead designer came in and took on that role officially?

Jamie Smith (30:09)
Yeah. Shortly afterwards, they were looking to expand the team with more experience, because they'd just finished Driver the year before and didn't have a second or third project up and running yet — that eventually became Watch Dogs. Because Watch Dogs was even higher profile, a collaboration with Montreal, most of the experienced people went onto those projects, and eventually they started to upskill and scale up the Crew team. That was totally fine for me — I was working on content, showcasing it, communicating with stakeholders, and when somebody else came in I just handed the baton and said, I've steadied the ship up to this point, steered us in this direction so far. I went back to picking up what I'd done previously — taking on a feature, setting standards, making suggestions, still involved in stakeholder chats, and for E3, because they had a big reveal, there was a whole bunch of special builds I was deeply involved in putting together. I was still in the thick of the project, just not with a lead title anymore.

Alex (31:40)
That's very magnanimous of you — at that period in my career, I'm not sure I'd have handled it as well as you sound like you did. But it sounds like you got to keep doing a lot of similar work, which I'm guessing was very satisfying and much in your wheelhouse.

Jamie Smith (32:01)
Exactly. Whenever I describe it to people — even when I say I'm moving into a direction role — I just look at it as adding value every day to the project. That's more important to me than how many letters you might have on your Slack profile. The role might have changed temporarily, but I was still trying to add the same value every single day. The title is almost just a recognition of what that contribution was.

Alex (32:33)
That's super impressive, Jamie — I think I've only really matured to that in the last ten years, and I'm much older than you. My silly tagline is that all I want to do right now is help great people make great things, which is very much the same mentality: just trying to help, trying to add value.

Alex (32:55)
So I guess you stayed at Ubisoft for a while, and it sounds like you had a lot of cross-studio collaboration — working with Lyon, working with Paris HQ. That line designer role — were you actually in Paris for that period of time?

Jamie Smith (33:15)
Yes, I was in Paris for a short amount of time. Slightly before that, internally at Ubisoft they used to run what they called RGD training — Rational Game Design training, their internal design philosophy, a pragmatic, scientific approach to designing games — more a science than an art, at least at that time. When I was at their academy, a chateau in remote Paris, I met a line designer who was based in Paris directly. They'd fly people from all over the world, run the training for a week, and you'd go back to your studio and share the knowledge as an advocate for it. The guy I met, by pure chance, had gone to Teesside University. He's from Paris.

Alex (34:16)
No way.

Jamie Smith (34:16)
Yeah, and he did a masters in Creative Visualization — a few years ahead of me. He went and worked as a line designer at Paris HQ, which is where Ubisoft's editorial team is — their internal publishing department, essentially. I got the chance to join that team, working on maybe half a dozen games at the time: Rainbow Six Siege, Trials Fusion, Far Cry 4, Ghost Recon Wildlands, and Assassin's Creed Unity, which had only just come out at that point. I was working in head office for the best part of a couple of months — in and out of calls, cross-studio collaboration, working until the night sometimes because you're working with Montreal. That was fantastic — a different culture. That was really when I started to appreciate what a good steak tastes like, because it was in Paris.

Alex (35:14)
What a great opportunity to get broad exposure to other projects under the Ubisoft umbrella, and to learn that more formal structure.

Jamie Smith (35:28)
Yeah, I'll mention one thing — the best part about that was, I was actually leaving Ubisoft at the time. This was towards the end of my time there, and I got this opportunity. The studio head, Pauline Jacquet — fantastic, probably the greatest studio head I've ever had — I told her, as I was leaving, that I'd really be interested in getting involved in some of these higher-profile games, the ones I just mentioned. She said, don't worry, I'm going to send you to Paris, you're going to be living and working there for the next couple of months. I said, yeah, but I'm still leaving the company — I thought she was trying to convince me otherwise. She said no, no, no — the reason I'm doing this is because I want you to leave Ubisoft in the best graces, in terms of what the company has given you. She said she'd heard of people leaving Ubisoft and complaining about certain projects, but she wanted me to leave with the best experience I'd had. I went to Paris, and yeah, that was one of the best experiences I've ever had in games.

Alex (36:40)
Wow, that's incredible — what a wonderful opportunity, especially under that context. So I guess you leave Ubisoft and join EA?

Jamie Smith (36:52)
Yeah, that's it. It was a combination of two things — giving a bit back to the university, since I was working in a university role at the same time, and a game design opportunity that came up for live-service support on FIFA, working remotely with different teams. It was all game balance, statistics for the players, feeding into Ultimate Team, their free-to-play mode — very stats-heavy, basically a giant spreadsheet. I did that for three and a half years, almost moonlighting as a game designer, with the daytime being education back at the university.

Alex (37:39)
Right, because you were a lecturer at Teesside at the same time.

Jamie Smith (37:42)
Yeah, that's it — back to the university. Funnily enough, the story comes full circle. When I joined the industry, we'd just had that financial crash; 2015 comes along, six or seven years later, and there was a need in the northeast for the next generation of talent. They were looking at local universities for who was providing the most talent, or who could be upskilled. I saw that as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, because at the same time I was also looking to buy a house. So giving something back to the university, the training I'd had at Ubisoft, the life circumstances, and being able to still work in games with EA — those factors just coalesced.

Alex (38:34)
Sounds like a pretty hard amount of work though — lecturing during the day and then balancing at night, is that kind of how it worked out?

Jamie Smith (38:41)
Yeah, yeah — there's no other way to describe it other than it was like having a part-time job and a full-time job at the same time.

Alex (38:46)
Full-time job.

Jamie Smith (38:48)
Pretty much, yeah — it wasn't exactly two full-time jobs. The reason I mention it is that EA — the FIFA or EA Sports franchise — has regular weekly updates, and the idea is that the stats we were changing reflect the authentic real-world counterparts. If Man City had a good result and a player had a great game, you'd see that reflected. So it was almost steady work, whereas a more traditional, non-live game development project would be lots of work, then not much, then lots again. This was just steady across the board.

Alex (39:30)
I guess every week you had a certain amount of balancing to do, and then—

Jamie Smith (39:35)
—exactly, yeah. There were producers overseeing it — for me personally, I was also handling my hometown club. Obviously you could potentially manipulate the stats in your favour, but there are fallbacks — you can only change things within certain constraints, and then it goes through a producer who signs it off. It was a great experience.

Alex (39:59)
Managing your hometown club — and also my club, Tottenham.

Jamie Smith (40:04)
Nice, yeah — I might have made Darren Anderton a bit worse if he was still playing.

Alex (40:09)
He was a bit OP, okay. So you balanced those two roles, the game designer at night and lecturer during the day, and then you move over to — sorry, Sumo. What took you to Sumo, what were you aiming to achieve, and how do you reflect on that time?

Jamie Smith (40:36)
Yes, I was towards the end of my time at university, having been upskilled into education — I did a teaching qualification. The university had given me a lot in terms of pushing myself forward and building transferable skills. At Ubisoft I mentioned one of the most talented design teams I'd been part of — I'd always kept in touch with those guys, and still do. One of my friends from there, Andy Willens, got in touch to say he'd like to talk to me about the next crop of students, because they were looking to upskill and scale up the studio for new projects. He said he'd come and chat — which was also a slight ruse, because he was there to tell me he was moving from lead designer into a direction position, which opened the door to a lead design role. So when I first joined Sumo, it was to work on a Robin Hood game as a senior designer with a view to becoming the lead, and that's effectively what happened within the first six months or so. I joined a pre-production game — you sneak into a castle in a medieval context, open a secret door, steal some treasure, and extract. It's a bit like an extraction game, team versus team, in a Robin Hood context. When I joined, the game loop was already there — probably one of the first games I've worked on where the game as it shipped, I saw on my first day. You had to squint a little, but the whole thing was there. I joined to own the three Cs, the combat, and various other systems — a wide remit for that project.

Alex (42:38)
Right, okay, great — and that was Hood: Outlaws & Legends. And then you move into an official lead role — did that bring on people management? Did you have direct reports at that point?

Jamie Smith (42:52)
Yeah, the design team was maybe eight or nine people at that time — one or two UX/UI people, a bunch of level designers doing their own thing and largely managing themselves, and on the game design side it was me and at first one other person, later growing to four designers total. I helped out with the level designers sometimes, upskilling and mentoring, being a sounding board for advice. That was the point where, much like on The Crew, I was offloading a lot of content work — content within guardrails, or within goalposts I'd defined, with the designers working within those bounds. It was a pretty small team, working tight-knit together, and the lead role was really just me offloading content to people, giving them a lot of free time and space, but within guidelines.

Alex (44:09)
I'm curious if you felt a difference in your ability to lead, before and after your teaching period — I imagine it upskilled you a lot in people management and leadership.

Jamie Smith (44:24)
Yeah, definitely in terms of public speaking — at the university it would literally be a room of up to three hundred people, almost like a cinema, and you're at the front, this tiny person on stage like a rock star. Another part was conveying complex subjects in a way people could understand. There's a notion in education called a threshold concept — the idea that your knowledge can't progress any further until you unlock wherever that knowledge is. I don't know anything about cars, but if you know about one particular bolt, you can open the engine and fix it; if you don't know about that bolt, you'll never be able to fix your car. The second part is conveying that threshold concept in a way people can understand and take on board — it might be how you present yourself, how you put a presentation together, or the analogies you use, like, remember in this game it's this particular feature, but we're going to do this instead. I'd say I ended up with a wider toolbox of ways to convey what I already knew, or didn't know. Earlier in my career, even if I knew the answers, I probably couldn't have delivered them in the best way.

Alex (46:04)
That's great, really good insight. You just got better at explaining things, breaking things down.

Jamie Smith (46:10)
That's the summary, yeah.

Alex (46:12)
It's easy to think you understand something so it's simple to convey, but you don't realise how many steps you've taken to get there that other people still need to take.

Jamie Smith (46:26)
Exactly, yeah.

Alex (46:27)
It's interesting. And you work your way through — campaign, system design — up to principal, which I'm guessing was a shift away from lead. Usually principal is more hands-on and lead is more people management — is that how it worked at Sumo?

Jamie Smith (46:45)
That's exactly it, yeah. In most, if not all, companies I've been at, that's the differentiator — are you judged on the quality of the work, or the quality of the team? A preference of mine was always to stay hands-on, communicating with the team in more of a product-owner kind of role. Despite having had line reports in a lead role — mentoring and upskilling within the discipline, which is great — what really keeps me engaged is working with a cross-discipline team to push the industry forward. With a lead role, you're helping somebody else progress, which is great, but I still prefer the other thing. Horses for courses, depending on where you are in the team, and because I got to sample both, I know which one's my preference. Because I'm moving into a design direction role now, that's more of a larger remit across the game, and less about the discipline-specific stuff.

Alex (48:02)
It feels like you've weaved in and out of discipline focus and craft focus. Sumo's an interesting company at that time too — a big swathe of projects, and great at supporting other games, so maybe you were pulling on cross-project skills as well.

Jamie Smith (48:26)
The good thing about it was I joined Sumo at a good time — the Newcastle studio, which is what I was part of, wasn't the mothership; that was Sheffield, six or seven hundred people at the time, working on multiple projects: Crackdown Three, Sackboy, historically Virtua Tennis, historically the Sega games. Then, around the time of the Tencent takeover, The Chinese Room came into the fold, Red Kite Games came into the fold, Leamington spun up a studio, Lab42, and so on — it started to become more like Ubisoft in terms of structure. But Ubisoft have forgotten more than most people know about cross-studio collaboration. That's the thing I've found, not just with Sumo but with other studios — as soon as you expand, or not everybody's under the same roof, or you've got a team that hasn't delivered on something before, it's almost like too many points of failure. At Ubisoft, yes, you make sequels in some instances, but these are extremely talented people who've done it five, six, seven times before. I worked on the Call of Duty team and it was much the same — don't worry, we've done this ten times before, even if it looks like chaos, the plane lands every single time. It might be controlled chaos, but it works.

Alex (50:04)
So I guess you were well placed to be at that company at that time, with that range of projects.

Jamie Smith (50:13)
Yeah, exactly. It was the variety of the projects that interested me, because the company and the studio were growing into this almost hub-and-spoke kind of structure — here's how we did things at Ubisoft, it's not to say it'll work here, but here's some insight. And bear in mind, Ubisoft is cross-time-zone and cross-language, Sumo was not — Sumo was all in the UK, everyone in the same time zone. Typically the structure at Ubisoft would be a lead studio and one or more support studios. At Sumo that wasn't necessarily the case — sometimes everybody was in Sheffield, sometimes you had ten people here and ten people there, but which of those two sets of people is the lead of the studio —

Alex (51:10)
Friction. Yeah.

Jamie Smith (51:06)
— you get that messy middle, the grey area, the friction, the unspoken conversations. But I liked it because there was more variety in the projects, and I'd had past experience of how we'd done things more successfully elsewhere, so it was a case of bringing that to the table to see if there were any nuggets they wanted to pull from.

Alex (51:31)
I love that. So you were at Sumo for about four and a bit years, then jump over to People Can Fly, again more three Cs work, working closer to the project director, then over to Behaviour, continuing that principal role. The three Cs have been a common touchpoint in your career — what is it about them that really draws you?

Jamie Smith (52:06)
It's always come from — I'd say Mortal Kombat is guilty of this — the notion that punching somebody feels satisfying moment to moment. That's what I feel with any game: a classic example, Horizon Forbidden West comes out, fantastic sequel, PS5, great environments — I spent forty-five minutes in the first area just spinning the character in a circle, jumping up and down, running in and out of the water, checking what they did and didn't think about. You're trying all these character abilities, how it feels to traverse the world. It's that classic Mario 64 thing — you go into the castle grounds and just run around, a toy box, no objectives, it just feels fun. I worked on Call of Duty during my time at Sumo, and we used to say it needs to feel good to miss, because that's what people are doing most of the time — people think it's about the headshots and the crazy 360 noscopes, but it needs to feel good to shoot a brick in the wall, just standing still. That's what I look for in games, not just shooters but driving games, platformers, even match-three: how does it feel to do the thing you do all the time? I just call it immediate satisfaction. I think it comes from Mortal Kombat — you punch the guy, an excessive wrestling-style head-snap animation, blood goes in the direction of the hit, and it just feels good, across the board.

Alex (54:05)
I love that, tracing that all the way back to Mortal Kombat. I agree.

Alex (54:10)
Great answer, I echo all of that. You also mentioned your taste in games has shifted a bit as you've made games — talk to me about that.

Jamie Smith (54:24)
I used to think I wanted to work on the games I liked to play, and for a time I did — I worked on The Division, into co-op shooters like Left 4 Dead, this loot-based New York game where you're with your friends: perfect skill set as a designer, third person and so on. At a certain point it became more about adding value to the game day to day, less about a particular genre — I've worked on driving games, platformers, shooters, without having worked in those genres before, just learning as I went. At Ubisoft, I used to play whatever the big triple-A release was that week — every Friday, all the designers around a big screen: this week Hitman Absolution, next week Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, next week Mercenaries 2, giant open-world games, a twenty-, thirty-, forty-hour investment, and I'd complete them start to finish. I couldn't think of anything worse right now. Now I'm the complete opposite — day to day I might be working on a medieval combat game, but I'm a secret golf fiend, playing tons of golf games for that same immediate satisfaction of hitting the ball. I'm quite indie-pilled too — card battlers, dice-based games. Ultimately it's about being respectful of my time. I had a lot more time ten, fifteen years ago, and now I can throw a game away quickly if it doesn't respect my time, and move on easily — Game Pass plays into that too, it's a disposable economy, four hundred games, and if one's no good you just move to the next, sometimes without even downloading it. I haven't had the chance to work on a golf game yet, but that's what I play now, even while working on a combat shooter or medieval combat day to day.

Alex (57:07)
I think, like you say, game feel is universal — whether it's match three or a deep, complex extraction shooter — and it's the pivotal part of what makes games interactive, whatever genre you're working on. As we start to wind this down — you mentioned that taking the lecturer job and the EA job was partly so you could buy a house. It sounds like this career has been very influential in your real-world life. How has being a game developer changed you, how has it evolved you?

Jamie Smith (57:59)
Probably for the better, in terms of my health and happiness across the board. Earlier in my career I'd heard this thing that said: friends, family, hobbies and health — if you want to be good, pick two of those; if you want to be great, pick one. I'm the opposite of that now. Earlier on I might have put gaming hobbies ahead of health, and work colleagues ahead of family, and at a certain point maybe not friends either — chasing the next promotion or the next project. Now health comes first, and the rest is a bonus. Years ago I was spending fifteen, twenty hours, playing games until three in the morning, then going to work the next day and doing ten, twelve hours in a studio, classic crunch culture. Now, barring this call, it's earlier nights and resting habits. From the human element, it's about recognising to put yourself first more than Jira tasks and deadlines, because it'll still be there tomorrow, still be there next month. I've worked on deadlines that then change, and you start to second-guess whether it's a real deadline or a pseudo deadline that keeps moving. The summary is basically just to put yourself first, in terms of health and happiness.

Alex (1:00:00)
At the end of the day, we're just making video games — we're not saving lives, we're not making big political decisions. They matter, we've both built careers doing it, but it's still just video games, so—

Jamie Smith (1:00:17)
—exactly, yeah. On the house side — I'm a bit of an avid learner, so I've learned a lot about property, paying off my house and things like that. The industry has allowed me to do that, but ever since getting a house I've been mindful that I work to live, I don't live to work. At university, some people didn't want to progress themselves too much because they had a comfortable mortgage and a comfortable pension lined up. But in an industry that doesn't have the best job security at the moment, I wanted to scale myself up to make sure I had a roof over my head first and foremost.

Alex (1:01:09)
That's smart — you haven't put all your eggs in one basket. And going back to working to live rather than living to work — video games are fun, it can be really hard not to fall into wanting to do it all the time. You've got to check yourself sometimes and take a step back.

Jamie Smith (1:01:30)
Exactly, yeah.

Alex (1:01:32)
Well, Jamie, thank you for your time — awesome story, weaving your way through various roles and companies. It sounds like a career where effort and commitment has been met with opportunity, very familiar to me from my own career too. Thank you for chatting to me.

Jamie Smith (1:01:59)
Yeah, likewise — thanks for the opportunity, and again, keep up the great work. I'm an avid listener myself.

Alex (1:02:05)
Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.