Rick Schmitz

Rick Schmitz is a Game Art Director for PC, Mobile and Console platforms. Most recently, Rick was the Studio Art Director at PopCap games. Rick managed 15 artists at PopCap's Seattle office where he also worked with producers, designers and engineers to create games. Additionally, he worked with the marketing team to help with things like box art for our games. Shipped titles include:

Plants vs. Zombies: PC, Mac, iOS, DS, XBLA Peggle/Peggle Nights: iOS, DS, XBLA Zuma’s Revenge: PC, Mac, iOS Bejeweled 3: PC, Mac, iOS Bejeweled Blitz: PC, Mac, Facebook

Before that Rick was an Art Director with Activision at their Centerscore Studio making mobile games. There he managed 4 artists and oversaw all aspects of art production.

Previous to that, Rick was the Art Manager on Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar at Turbine Inc. As the Art Manager, Rick is the supervisor of a team of 11 artists. He maintains schedules and approves assets for artistic quality and style. Rick makes concept drawings, models, textures and animate many assets himself as well. He also works closely with the other members of the Dev team.

Rick started out at Turbine in the role of Art Director for AC2: Legions. As the Art Director he guided the look of the project, managed a team of artists and personally created many of the game’s art assets as well.

Before that at Sony Online Entertainment, Rick was on the Everquest 2 team as the Concept Lead. In that position he was responsible for shepherding the look and feel of all the races and environments of the EQ2 world and created hundreds of drawings himself as well. Rick also spent some time working on the Playstation 2 version of Everquest. Previous to that he was the Character Lead on the Scars of Velious expansion where he created and animated characters and headed up a 5-member team that created tons of new assets for the game. Rick’s time at SOE started as the character animator/designer for the original version of Everquest.

Rick started out in the Game industry at Blue Sky Software/Sega of America, where he was Lead Artist on Vectorman 2 on which he creating half of the levels himself. Rick also worked on many other Genesis projects including Roadrunner and Coyote, Ren and Stimpy, Shadowrun, Spider-man 32X as a Background Artist. Rick has a B. A. in Studio Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Before making video games, his professional career spanned a number of fields including Comics, Editorial Illustrations and Educational Software. A list of former clients and employers includes Image Comics, Marvel Comics, SCEA, 989 Studios, Presto Studios, Highlights for Children Magazine, and Humpty Dumpty Magazine. Rick has also taught Drawing classes and he has been a guest lecturer at Cal Arts for Character Design classes.