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Show 16 | MyWeberMedia.com | December 7, 2018 JUSTINE GIFFORD ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: SURVIVING GAME DEVELOPMENT By CAMERON GIFFORD Investigative Reporter It’s hard to be a video game developer, especially in Utah. Even someone relatively familiar with the game industry could be forgiven for not realizing development happens in Utah at all. Most of the development for what are considered triple-A games — “Red Dead Redemption 2,” “Fortnite,” “Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey” — takes place elsewhere: New York, North Carolina, Montreal, and of course, California. The numbers, however, show that the video game industry has a real presence in Utah — a presence not deterred by triple-A publishers or an often volatile culture. This presence generated $71 million in revenue and supported more than 1,200 jobs in Utah in 2017, according to a 2017 Entertainment Software Association report. The ESA site also lists 43 companies, developers and publishers, operating in Utah — this number up from 27 companies in a 2015 ESA report. One of the largest — and only triple-A — game companies in Utah in recent memory, EA Salt Lake, shut down in 2017. Executive Producer Vance Cook, who left the company seven years before it was closed down by EA’s main headquarters, said his studio was a 25-year success. In fact, Cook not only created one of the first major golf titles but developed the genre as a whole over the better part of three decades. Cook’s involvement with the video game industry started in 1987 with Access Software, where he finished work on a golf game called “Links 386 Pro.” Five years later, Cook founded Headgate Studios based largely off the royalties from “Links.” Cook said even in 1992, Utah didn’t present any unique challenges to opening up a game studio specifically. State and regional factors came later. “At that time, I was creating my own product,” Cook said. “It was just challenging funding it, bringing people in and overcoming the engineering and financial problems you would get in starting any business.” At the time, Cook and his team were |