George Fidler

George is one of the few people in the world to have run away from the circus to become a chartered accountant. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he does claim he didn’t enjoy sitting there and adding up long columns of numbers and wu poweut poipou. Sorry, slumped forwards into the keyboard for a second. Accountancy does that to normal people. He doesn’t want to admit that he started in the games business as one of ‘The Suits’ - the blank-eyed and disturbing little grey men who abduct people, take them into their mysterious spaceships and shove probes into orifices that were never meant to have probes put there. Ever. Either that, or he was one of ‘The Grays’ who run the game industry from their secret mountain fastness known only as ‘Head Office’. Whatever he was doing, he did it extremely well, and the Deep Ones of EA saw that he had the right kind of malleable DNA for their experiments. They promoted him to be King of All He Surveyed, or at least King of All He Surveyed in the Asia-Pacific region, which is slightly more accurate but not quite as intimidating. Such was his supreme power that he could stalk the land of EA and games like a, well, big stalky thing. And during his enlightened reign EA Asia-Pacific grew large and waxed fruitful, so he had even more to stalk about in…

It was he who decided that EA should do local (to Australia) sports as games: Cricket, Rugby (Union and League), Australian Rules Footy, Drown the Pommy Bastard: fun titles, and all good stuff. Tim had done that programming malarkey for years, so George spotted that he might just, maybe, possibly, probably, oh yes, be the man to do all those sports titles. So possibly a close working relationship was formed, you think?

Well, there is no truth in the rumour that they answer to ‘George and Bungle’.

Actually, George signed up CA to EA for Shogun: Total War, as he could see it was going to be fantastic. Or really fantastic. One of the two. Probably the second. Eventually, he couldn’t cope with the confusing initials any more and ended up working for CA rather than EA (making a two-place leap up the alphabet) as the rather splendidly titled Business Development Director. He now runs CA OZ, which sounds like a really unpromising set of Scrabble letters, but is actually a whole new Studio in Australia (the name is a clue). And very nice it is too.

Most of the time George is as jolly as a jolly thing on jolly pills with a personal soundtrack of the Neighbours theme running inside its head all day. The rest of the time he’s even jollier, doing awesome, magnificent stuff! This, when you come to think about it, is bloody scary. He might look like the normal, well-adjusted one with the laid-back lifestyle, but is he?

Source: CA OZ company homepage