Neil Duffield

Neil Duffield began work for Microprose in 1992 and was quickly offered the lead programmer position on F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0, released on the Amiga. He left to co-found the Psygnosis Studio based in Stonehouse, and created much of the core technology used in several popular PlayStation titles: Assault Rigs, G-Police, Overboard and G-Police: Weapons of Justice. He was the head programmer at Psygnosis Stonehouse and was asked to run the studio for the final few months of its operation. Neil was then involved in founding the Acclaim office based in Cheltenham, involving many ex-Psygnosis staff, where he worked as the Technical Director and created core technology which was used for the release of the studios first title, RC Revenge.

Neil spent the next few years learning the low level secrets of the PlayStation 2 which resulted in some highly optimised engines. He worked for Microprose again while developing a state of the art animation and rendering engine for the PS2 version for Grand Prix 4. He then worked for LTStudios Ltd. (an Argonaut-owned studio) as head of technology, where he created yet another suite of technology for the PS2, Xbox and PC.

Neil then joined Climax where he met Gary Liddon and worked on PS2 technology demos for product pitches involving EA and Sony. He then left Climax to pursue contract programming, working with Kuju on Terror Strike.

He joined up with Gary Liddon again in July 2005 to be part of the Xen group and work on Crackdown, resulting in an optimal character animation, rendering and behaviour engine, which allowed the game to process and render around 2,000 in game characters. Since then Neil has worked with Xen on optimising other Microsoft games: Too Human and Fable II, where he provided multiple low level optimisation solutions.

Neil also helped Xen with pitching the technology for their current project to prospective publishers. Xen became Ruffian Games where he was a senior programmer until March 2013. As of August 2021, he is a freelance consultant and contrator.