Bob Rafei and Dan Arey, founders of Big Red Button Entertainment (BRB), have entered into a strategic partnership with Emergent Game Technologies. The partnership will position Emergent as BRB's central technology resource and enhance BRB's creative vision, exceptional team and game design prowess. Marc Jackson, founder of Seahorn Capital, orchestrated the partnership and his team will continue to play a key role in building a strong foundation for this ground-breaking collaboration.
Big Red Button and Emergent will work together to advance BRB's scalable distributed production methodology, centered around Emergent's technology. BRB will become a premier licensee of the Gamebryo LightSpeed game development system and assist Emergent by showcasing prototypes and refining cutting-edge tools and features for the upgraded platform. Emergent will in turn provide custom development services to support BRB's first projects.
"Our greatest resource is the culture of our company. In choosing to develop this strategic relationship with BRB as part of our game technology initiative, we had to ensure that the intent for both parties was to create a true partnership, as opposed to us just selling a license," said Geoffrey Selzer, CEO of Emergent. "LightSpeed is designed to enable this level of collaboration between Emergent and its customers. We think this combination of BRB, Seahorn Capital, and Emergent establishes a new model for the next generation of AAA game development."
Big Red Button Ent. was founded by game industry veterans Rafei and Arey in 2008. Rafei has worked for 16 years in the games industry, serves on several industry panels and advisory boards and was employee #1 at Naughty Dog , where he was instrumental in creating celebrated original properties CRASH BANDICOOT, JAK & DAXTER and UNCHARTED. Arey is a 20-year veteran of such companies as Electronic Arts, Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog, where he was lead designer, writer and Creative Director. Arey has played a key role on 15 released titles and is on the video game faculty at USC School of Cinema.
