Matt Hughson

Matt Hughson has been working professionally in the videogame industry since 2003. Although born in Georgetown, Ontario, Canada, he attended university in Florida, where he completed the Game Design and Development course at Full Sail University. He has spent a majority of his career in British Columbia, Canada working at both Electronic Arts , and Radical Entertainment.

He began his career at InSprite Interactive; a small start-up company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. There he helped create a demo of a 3rd-person adventure game, based on a brand new IP and inspired by games like The Legend of Zelda.

When that project failed to find a publisher, Matt took a short leave from professional game development to become the Course Director of a new class at the Computer Master Institute of Technology in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This position took him from central Canada all the way to the west coast, where he took on the responsibility of not only creating, but teaching a Game Development course of his own.

From there Matt was recruited by one of the largest game studios in the world, Electronic Arts Canada, in Burnaby, BC. While there he helped create and maintain online features used across numerous game projects around the world. His work can be seen in everything from FIFA soccer, to Madden NFL, to NHL, and many more. Although he enjoyed being a part of so many AAA sports projects, his excitement was captured after seeing a demo at Radical Entertainment for what would become the open-world game Prototype.

Matt accepted an offer at Radical lead work on a brand new Front End system built on top of Flash. This work was meant to be used across the entire company, but when Radical Entertainment became part of Activision in 2008, all projects at the company were cancelled except for Prototype. At this point the central technology group was disbanded and Matt became an official member of the Prototype game team.

When Prototype concluded, Matt moved from the Front End team to the Mission Support team, eventually become the lead of that team during the production of Prototype 2. However, shortly after Prototype 2 shipped, Activision once again performed mass layoffs at Radical Entertainment, reducing the entire studio to just a small fraction of what it once was. Matt managed to survive those layoffs and became an external developer on Destiny.

In 2012 Matt left Radical Entertainment to help build a new studio in Vancouver: Digital Scapes. Starting with just 3 people, they (more-than) doubled in size within the first year! Funded by Techland, the studio behind Dead Island, they developed a special PVP “be the zombie” game mode for the game Dying Light, released in early 2015.

Currently Matt is working for Microsoft at The Coalition creating Gears of War!