Four ex-Riot staffers have joined Supercell’s previously-announced US studio, with two more veterans to set up a second North American outfit.
Supercell’s North America lead Ryan Wener confirmed the six new hires on LinkedIn.
The second US studio is being formed by Seattle-based veterans Steve Desilets and Matt Mocarski, who co-founded Scuttlebutt Games in 2019 to make survival shooter Deliver Us.
Desilets is now game lead at Supercell’s second US studio, working on a new IP. He has been in game development for almost 30 years, and has previously served as creative director at Amazon and EA, had two stints at Valve and worked at Zynga as design director. He has also held art and design roles at Looking Glass, Harmonix and Oddworld Inhabitants.
Mocarski has held senior art positions at Playgig, King, Amazon and Carbine, and joins Supercell’s second US studio as art lead.
Meanwhile, four ex-Rioters have joined Supercell US lead Ryan Wener at Supercell’s previously-announced North America studio.
Candace Thomas moves from a senior management role at Riot to a game design position at Supercell’s NA studio, working on ‘Game vision, principles, direction, prototyping and team building’, according to her LinkedIn.
Prior to her time at Riot, Thomas also held senior game designer roles at Amazon and Blizzard.
Charles Lee joins Supercell US as art lead, joining after a seven-year stint at Riot. Prior to that he worked in senior art roles at Sony Pictures, Blizzard, EA, Spark Unlimited, Obsidian and Imagi.
Maya Kylmamaa is now game lead at Supercell US. She has previously held senior programming and engineering roles at Housemarque, Lionhead, DICE, Digital Extremes, Blizzard and – of course – Riot. She was most recently CEO at Reforged Studios.
Fellow ex-Rioter Kevin Bray is now game engineer at Supercell US. He takes the role having previously worked as executive director at Bitkraft-backed mobile studio Tonk Tonk Games and CEO at start-up Byte Canvas.
Bray worked on League of Legends at Riot from 2011-2015, and prior to that worked at New Sound Games, Bluepoint and more.
Supercell has stated previously that it aims to make “games you might not expect” from its new US operation.
Supercell has not launched a new game globally since Brawl Stars in December 2018, and recently ended development on Clash Quest and Everdale.
It has, however, been busily investing in an array of studios over the last few years, including HypeHype, Space Ape, Trailmix, Ultimate Game Studio, Metacore and even dipped its toe in web3 by part-funding Oxalis Games.
