Chris Naves

Chris Naves was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1970. He has been drawing and painting since youth. He has been working on games a little later in life at the ripe old age of 28, but always dabbled on the early home computers like the Commodore 64. Art always came easier to him than tech, but it would seem to be a key to his future.

In March 1998 he started his professional career at Interplay and his first game contract was called VR Sports Power Boat Racing. It was actually just texture work for a higher res AGP version but it was a start. He also worked on VR Sports Baseball 99 and 2000 until April 1999.

After Interplay he worked for Shiny Entertainment and continued as a technical artist using the Messiah engine technology, the same tech that VR Baseball used and in the same titled game Messiah and finally Sacrifice. He worked for Shiny (2000-2010), although it changed ownership from Interplay to Infogram/Atari to Foundation 9 and eventually became a new studio Double Helix. Throughout this time his title changed from Artist to Senior Artist and then to Senior Technical Artist ending up in the tools and technology group.

Naves went on contract with a few companies during 2010 Akina interactive, Uber Entertainment and Supervillain Studios. This led to help in the startup of a few companies the following year as Technical Art Director at FireForge games, and Art Director at Checkpoint Studios and Xseed's new west coast studio called Marvelous USA. In July 2013 Chris joined Konami Digital Entertainment, Orange County Development Studio as Art Director.

Now, shifting gears a bit into more management, Chris was the Art Outsource Manager at Obsidian entertainment, and then moved to the bay area to take on the role of the Outsource Manager for Game Art at Machine Zone in Palo Alto. In both these roles, the studio’s art departments , added the role and was newly set up, without a dedicated Outsource team, and Chris has been the head of those teams, helping create the pipelines, communication standards and stable vendor relations.

Chris is currently the Outsourcing Art Director at Turtle Rock Studios, the creators of Left for Dead, located in in Lake Forest, CA.