Rex Crowle - Art/Creative Director
Creator and Decorator of Undiscovered Universes
Return To Monkey Island (2022)
Art Director
Terrible Toybox
”Return to Monkey Island is an unexpected, thrilling return of series creator Ron Gilbert that continues the story of the legendary adventure games The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games.”
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As a kid, the original Monkey Island games were my favourites. Their combination of memorable characters, atmospheric environments, and self-referential humour was what originally inspired me to start doing something more with all the crayon drawings and stories I had been scribbling. So it was a huge honour, decades later, to be asked to art direct the sequel, working alongside many of its original creators.
The latest game features the series hero Guybrush Threepwood reminiscing and sharing stories of the high seas with his son. I devised a story-book style to subtly match the way this narrative is being delivered. So while the environments are still richly detailed and atmospheric as you explore them, you can also feel like you are turning the pages of a classic storybook.
Initially I produced the pre-production versions of all the locations and characters to create a playable block-out of the whole game, to establish the colour palettes and compositional variety. I was able to recruit a fantastic team of artists and animators to continue developing this through to final-quality, while directly working on a proportion of it myself. This project required a lot of art and animation, so I worked very closely with the Production team to bring it in on-time, with a consistent and achievable quality level.
Since its release I have designed work for its boxed versions, limited edition items and ongoing merchandise.
Awards Include:
BILBAO GAMES CONFERENCE
Art Direction Award Winner 2022
GOLDEN JOYSTICK AWARDS
PC Game Of The Year Winner 2022
Knights And Bikes (2019)
Creative Director
& Co-Founder
Foam Sword
“Saddle up for a bike-riding, frisbee-throwing, goose-petting, friendship-building, treasure-hunting, story-driven adventure for 1 or 2 players!”
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Knights And Bikes was a real passion project, a game created by friends for friends to play together. On the tiny core team of three, I was “focused” on producing the art, animation, level design, world-building and story.
We wanted to make a game that captured that time in childhood when you get your first bike and experience the independence that it gives you. You explore, you make new friends, start to deal with deeper emotions together, and try to decipher the adult world around you.
It’s representing that time in life when you’re bursting with imagination and energy, so a lot of our work went into trying to represent this on screen and in the story. A stop-motion animation style shows that the characters are fizzing with energy and ideas, and the everyday rural environments they explore are slowly transformed into something more fantastical by the children’s wild imaginations.
As the game was initially funded with crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter, I also worked on the public pitch (Kickstarter trailer, campaign website, and stoking the social media engagement) as well as designing the additional backer rewards (box-art, t-shirts, posters, art book & toys). There has also been ongoing development of the I.P. as it made its transition into a series of novels, exhibitions, and was optioned by Tiger Aspect Productions for a potential animated series.
Awards Include:
INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL (IGF)
Best Visual Art Winner 2020
BAFTA
Artistic Achievement Nomination 2020
Best British Game Nomination 2020
Best Family Game Nomination 2020
Best Debut Nomination 2020
GAME DEVELOPERS CHOICE (GDC)
Best Debut Finalist 2020
PLAYSTATION UNIVERSE
Best PS4 indie Game Winner 2019
Tearaway Unfolded (2015)
Creative Lead
Media Molecule / Sony
“Uncover the true power of your DUALSHOCK®4 to join forces with ATOI THE MESSENGER. Unfold her magical papery world, save her pals in peril and battle the monsters trying to stop her delivery!”
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(For the origin story of this game series, whizz down to the original Tearaway section below)
This semi-sequel brought our magical papery adventure to the larger audience on Playstation4 after its original exclusive release on Playstation Vita.
Along with its tactile papery world, and its folk tale inspirations, part of Tearaway’s DNA is utilising the Playstation hardware in surprising and charming ways. The key to developing this semi-sequel on a new hardware platform, was for us to make something of the relationship between you sitting on your couch holding a controller, and a world inside your TV which you were exploring and effecting.
Once again the team experimented with novel interactions using this theme, and as creative lead, I helped the team fully realise their best and most creative ideas, as well as integrating them back into the narrative of the game.
BAFTA Best British Game Nominee 2016
(See Tearaway below for additional awards)
Tearaway (2013)
Creative Lead
Media Molecule / Sony
”In Tearaway you’ll journey through a vibrant, living papery world, with a plucky messenger who has a unique message to deliver – to you.”
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Tearaway was the first time I’d led a game team. The project developed from a desire I had to make a uniquely tactile game for a new Sony handheld console. I wondered what it would it be like to have a game that knew about YOU the player, the person holding this whole world in your godlike hands? How would it react to your touch or the way you held the console, and could it even allow you to push you fingertips into the world within?
It didn’t feel like a traditional world built of bricks and mortar would react enough to all of this, so we set out to build the world out of paper, a material that if simulated well would bend and sway or unfold like a pop-up book. And then we utilised the hardwares’s touchscreen, microphones, camera and sensors to pull off this tactile magical trick.
As the lead I worked with the team to encourage everyones most creative and experimental ideas and then combined them together into a story-led and cohesive adventure. One that surprised players with how emotional the experience was. Each player was given a completely unique ending created out of everything they had customised or created during their journey. Players got pretty emotional about having their own creativity presented back to them in a way they never expected.
Awards include:
BAFTA
7 Nominations, and 4 wins:
Artistic Achievement Winner 2014
Best Handheld/Mobile Game Winner 2014
Best Family Game Winner 2014
SXSW Awards
Best Design & Direction Winner 2014
LittleBigPlanet
(2008)
LittleBigPlanet2 (2011)
Production Designer
Media Molecule / Sony
“If you were to stand on LittleBigPlanet and try to imagine a more astounding, fantastic, and creative place, full of enthralling adventure, uncanny characters, and brilliant things to do... you couldn’t. All imagination is here, and what you do with it all is entirely up to you.
Build new levels and expand the environment, collect the many and varied tools and objects to make your mark on this world, or just simply enjoy the people and puzzles they’ve set.”
——
LittleBigPlanet was the video-game we were all bursting to make. It was devised as a classic platform game where you run and jump through a series of levels, but with deeply integrated edit-mode included. We thought of it as the gaming equivalent of YouTube or Etsy. When players got a spark of inspiration from what they were playing they could seamlessly switch modes and start remixing what they’d played or create their own levels from scratch to share online.
For my contribution, I worked on its various internal pitches, its UI/UX, its graphic design and promotion and I masterminded the pop-culture element of the game. That part of the aesthetic that combined vinyl stickers, graffiti and doodles with licensed music and inspiration from cult children’s TV. Video games really didn’t look or sound anything like this back when we made LittleBigPlanet.
My personal aim with this style and atmosphere was to make LittleBigPlanet very approachable to players, and make it as natural to customise the game as stickering your skateboard or doodling on your school bag. The punkier edge also aimed to bring in some older players who maybe hadn’t done anything as creative in a while. This everyday approachability was also my main goal when I was designing the overall user-experience, as well as producing the live-action intros in which Stephen Fry gently introduced players to this crafting revolution.
Winner of over 70 Awards, including:
AIAS: Innovation in Gaming (2008)
AIAS: Console Game of the Year (2008)
BAFTA: Artistic Achievement (2008),
Game Developers Choice Awards: Innovation Award (2009)
Edge: Best Game (2008)
The Onion: Best of Year (2008)
Develop: Artistic Achievement (2009)
Spike TV Video Game Awards: Best PlayStation 3 Game (2008)
Metacritic 95%
Epic Win (2010)
Creative Director,
Co-Creator
“EpicWin is an iPhone app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everyday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.”
Epic Win was an app I conceived on a long train journey, and initially mocked-up in the image shown below. Long before Gamification became a “thing” I’d been thinking about how I would happily work through quest-logs in role-playing games, doing all the tasks I needed to. But in my actual life, it was much harder to tick off my to-do lists.
The idea was to create a new, fully featured, to-do list app. But to combine that with increasing stats, rewards, and the presentational sparkle that games employ that keep players playing. Except here, players would be getting XP boosts and winning loot for doing the laundry, instead of getting it for slaying dragons.
Epic Win was initially more of a UI experiment/hobby-project, but it became a hit app on iOS and Android thanks to a collaboration with Tak Fung (Supermono).
Additional Projects
Outside of games, I’ve worked on various projects in TV and advertising. Here’s a few from the archives:
Knights of Now (Disney) Series creator
Grip Wrench (MTV) Series creator
Orange Unlimited (Orange/Poke London) Illustrator
Celebrity Juice (ITV) Branding and Title Sequence
Older games I have worked on include:
The Movies (Lionhead Studios)
Project Dimitri (Lionhead Studios)
Fable (Lionhead Studios)
Black & White: Creature Isle (Lionhead Studios)