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Kellee Santiago is a big name in the video game world. She co-founded thatgamecompany, one of the breakout indie studios of the PlayStation 3 era, and her work with Jenova Chen got the small team attention with titles such as \u201cFlow\u201d and \u201cFlower\u201d before soaring to widespread acclaim with \u201cJourney.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her latest job at Niantic, the San Francisco-based company that began as an internal start-up at Google, puts her at the heart of one of the Bay Area\u2019s most promising, pioneering video game companies. The maker of \u201cIngress,\u201d \u201cPokemon Go\u201d and \u201cHarry Potter: Wizards Unite,\u201d Niantic has leveraged its augmented reality and geo-location technology to create some of the most wildly popular games for smartphones.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things I love about games (like Pokemon Go),\u201d Santiago says, \u201cis the way they can bring people together, break down walls between us and let us just be playful.<\/p>\n
Naturally, we had questions.<\/p>\n
Q: What lessons have you learned from your experiences with thatgamecompany, Ouya and the others?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> Games are hard to make. To embark on creating a video game that was unlike anything you have seen before requires a lot of courage. It can be very hard to see where you are at the beginning \u2013 like in \u201cJourney,\u201d an online console game that leaves you with a renewed faith in community. It\u2019s a tumultuous process, and you have to have a lot of faith. You start on a project in unknown territory.<\/p>\n [ad_2]<\/p>\n