Amazon recruits Clint Hocking and Kim Swift as senior designers
i.e. the people behind Splinter Cell, Far Cry 2 and Portal.
Amazon's really pushing its way into the video game space with the recent announcement of its Android-based Fire TV console and now it's been confirmed that Far Cry 2 lead Clint Hocking and Portal designer Kim Swift have joined the company that was once primarily an online bookstore.
Hocking and Swift have both confirmed the news on their LinkedIn pages where they're both credit as senior designers. Hocking started in February, while Swift only officially joined in April.
Swift was previously at Airtight games where she made the first-person puzzler Quantum Conundrum and the Ouya-exclusive viking-meets-funk rhythm/action game Soul Fjord.
Hocking's trajectory has been a bit more mysterious. He was best known as the man behind Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, but after wrapping up Far Cry 2 he left Ubisoft to work at LucasArts. He never shipped a game there - and given the studio's acquisition by Disney it appears that whatever he worked on will likely never see the light of day - and he left in June 2012. He then moved on to Valve for a year and a half, where he may or may not have worked on the rumoured Left 4 Dead 3, before departing in December 2013.