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Rebellion co-founder and CTO Chris Kingsley has received an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List.
Kingsley – who also chairs TIGA’s Education Committee and the Games Council at ScreenSkills – joins his brother, Jason, Rebellion’s other co-founder, who received his OBE in 2012.
UK developer Rebellion, formed in 1992, is behind games like Strange Brigade, Aliens vs Predator, and Sniper Elite. As well as being the UK’s leading independent games developer and publisher, Rebellion is also a major publisher of books and comic books. Through Audiomotion, it has also been closely involved in the production of feature films, TV, and adverts for over 15 years, contributing to US and UK productions like World War Z, Maleficent, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Iron Man 2, and The Watchmen.
"I am greatly honoured and very grateful to have been made an OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List," Kingsley said (thanks, GI.biz). "This honour represents a recognition of the achievements of Rebellion and perhaps more importantly, the entire UK video games development industry. I look forward to driving forward Rebellion, TIGA and the wider UK video games industry in the months and years to come."
Rebellion recently purchased a $100m, 220,000 square-foot facility near its Oxford base to transform into a film studio. The site of an old printing press will be able to "accommodate productions from TV drama to large-scale Hollywood productions" and is Rebellion’s second film studio alongside its own motion-capture company, Audiomotion, reportedly Europe’s largest performance capture stage. It’s expected the new facility will create up to 500 new jobs across Britain’s film and television industry.
