Codemasters Studios' computer game Race Driver: GRID recently won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) British Video Games Awards 2009 in the Video Games: Sports category, beating such titles as FIFA 09, Football Manager 2009, MotorStorm Pacific Rift, Pure and Wii Fit. This was announced officially at the MSC Malaysia Creative Content Hub @ KL Sentral on 20 May.

Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy won the Best Game award overall.

“This is the first time a BAFTA award was won by a Malaysian company,” said Kamil Othman, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) vice-president for Creative Multimedia.

The UK-based Codemasters Software Co. Ltd has facilities in the UK, Western Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia and Malaysia, and its local developers participated in the development of this winning game.

Codemasters Studios in Malaysia is a joint venture between Codemasters UK and Vision New Media an MSC Malaysia status company.

Altogether, Codemasters has over 60 titles which have been distributed across over 70 countries.

“One of the key objectives of Codemasters Malaysia was to build and develop a team of Malaysians who were capable of working on AAA titles,” said Codemasters Studios general manager Maxime Villandre.

“The pioneer team worked on Dirt, which was Codemasters' first foray in developing for the current generation console (Xbox360 & PS3). From this the team grew while always improving quality through transfer of knowledge and skill development undertook by local experts and from abroad,” Villandre added.

However, there's still a shortage of skilled and talented developers and while Codemasters Studios initially provided training, it cannot afford to do so anymore.

“We're not a training company and it's proving to be expensive, when we could more cheaply cross the Atlantic Ocean and work with our colleagues in the United States, and at this stage, we're close to deciding to pull out of Malaysia,” said Villandre over lunch afterwards.

Fortunately, the CG Skills Development Programmes – a tri-partite initiative between MDeC, KL Sentral and IM Foremost – based at the MSC Malaysia Creative Innovation Centre @ KL Sentral offers intensive two-week to 6 months long courses in 3D modelling and 3D animation for school leavers, graduates, working professionals and enthusiasts in 3D animation design. For some courses, students are planed in internships with MSC Malaysia companies.

“To date, CG Skills has successfully trained 20 students in various programmes,” said Kenjii Yong, IM Foremost chief executive officer.

Student loans from RM250 upwards can be arranged for Malaysian students, though CG Skills training programmes also include students frpom Ethiopia, Indonesia and the Middle East

Villandre believes that part of the problem of lack of design talent could be the still negative perception among parents in the value of careers in creative design, compared to more traditional careers as lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects and accountants, and moreover many are being drained away by Singapore.

“There's a need to make the public aware that this is a serious business with opportunity,” said Villendre.

“The creative animation industry is worth US$5.78 trillion worldwide and pricides two million jobs in the UK alone,” said Yong. “The 212 MSC Malaysia companies involved in creative multimedia are expect to make RM1.1 billion in 2010,” he added.

In 2007, the 163 MSC Malaysia companies in the Creative Multimedia Cluster provided over 5,600 jobs or a median of about 35 jobs per company.

“It would help if educationists introduce creativity into primary school level, as it's been shown that countries strong in intellectual property have strong art and creativity programmes in their primary schools,” said MDeC's Kamil Othman.

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