This week we take a look at games development company Deep Red.

Deep Red was set up in May last year by Clive Robert and Kevin Buckner, who first met in 1995 when they teamed up to launch Hasbro Interactive. Based in Milton Keynes and with a team of 26, Deep Red are already close to finishing Risk 2 for Hasbro Interactive, and have just started work on another PC game that's being kept closely under wraps for the time being.

Clive Robert
Clive Robert's career in games started with the board variety, which reached a crescendo in '91 when he was asked to head up Hasbro's board game division. A few years later, Clive presented a business plan to the Hasbro board of directors outlining the start of an interactive games division. In just six months, Hasbro's European Interactive division was up and running. A short time later, the US division was launched and Hasbro Interactive became a global phenomenon.

At that point, Clive's role switched to business development. This was another job he was pretty good at, signing the likes of Frogger (one of the few titles to go Platinum on the PSX), Monopoly and Risk (both of which have been selling successfully for more than three years), as well as RollerCoaster Tycoon (which has been in and out of the ChartTrack number one slot). At that point came the desire to move on and start Deep Red.

Kevin Buckner
Where Clive could be described as the business chap at Deep Red, Kevin Buckner is definitely the technical whizz. His first break came in 1982 when he joined Creative Sparks, a division of Thorn-EMI, writing computer games in Assembler - a job he describes as being "like Christmas every day".

Then followed a five year stint programming for Microprose in the US and the UK. With his growing desire to see the bigger picture, and with a career change beckoning, Kevin joined Electronic Arts in 1993 as a Producer - a role he not only enjoyed but was bloody good at.