Last year I wrote an article for videogame industry trade site Gamasutra entitled ‘The South African Game Development Scene: Past Present and Future,’ which attempted to look at the history of game development in South Africa and surmise how an industry may rise and move forward here.

The article was based on interviews conducted with a diverse, influential and talented group of developers both from and based in South Africa, but a lot of the responses were unfortunately not included due to the nature of the piece, so in an effort to share this potential goldmine of knowledge with aspiring game developers and gaming enthusiasts both here and abroad, I decided to start posting the interviews here on El33tonline, in full, continuing today with part four, and an interview with Jacques Krige (you can read part one, part two and part three as the mood takes you).

Jacques Krige (known as ‘Korax’ in the online development community) is the leader of South African game development community SAGameDev, owner of technology company Business Gateway, and founder of Excentrax Games.

As a self-taught programmer, level designer and game developer, Krige cut his teeth programming business applications and began working with level creation tools for a variety of id Software and Raven Software-developed games, as well as programming the NewHexen mod for Raven Software’s Hexen II.

More recently, Krige took over ownership of the South African game development community website, SAGameDev, and has continued work on upgrading the site, while taking an interesting approach to forming his own game development studio, Excentrax Games, by first creating and running a successful internet technology company, Business Gateway, to fund the games he and his studio will create in the future.

Currently, Krige and Excentrax Games are working with Unreal Engine 3 technology (after working with a variety of other technologies, including Microsoft’s XNA) to create their first game as a studio.

Let’s begin the interview:

Continue reading The Lost South African Game Developer Interviews Part 4: Jacques Krige.