"Even then, the town’s nickname was Silicon Spa"

Darren

Forging a triple-A career by accident

Darren Bowen never intended to work in video games.

He had no plans to be his own boss or set up his own company.

And he definitely didn’t want to study at the University of Warwick.

Fortunately, that all changed after an open day visit to the campus – and Darren never looked back.

“I grew up in a village near Oxford, so I was looking at going to a university in the midlands; somewhere new and different, but not too far from home,” he said.

“But my older brother was already studying at Warwick and I was adamant I wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps, so I'd almost ruled it out as an option.”

After considering the possibility of studying in alternative places like Nottingham and Loughborough, however, a trip to Warwick changed Darren’s thinking.

“The facilities and the laboratories were on such another level, it made my mind up for me,” Darren said.

A young Bowen couldn’t have realised it, but that decision would change everything, leading him to shape a successful career and carve out new roots in an adopted new hometown.

That’s because unbeknownst to Darren, the area around the University of Warwick was already the UK’s thriving hotbed of video game development, home to the some of the world’s top studios and the most famous of titles.

“I had A Levels in Maths, Further Maths, English Literature, Latin and Physics, so I had plenty of paths open to me,” he said.

“But I was interested more in the technical side of things and I wanted to go into some sort of engineering subject.

“The course I studied at Warwick, Computer Systems Engineering, was perfect for me because it was one of the few degrees out there that offered a hybrid of the computer science software and theory and the hands-on practical engineering.”

18-year-old Darren’s vision back in 2003 was to embark on a corporate career at one of the many big-name firms based in the West Midlands like IBM and slowly work his way up in a large enterprise.

“But at the end of my second year at Warwick, there was a programme called Step that matched students with summer placements and it just so happened that I got paired with a local gaming company,” he said.

That nearby firm was FreeStyleGames, the maker of competitive breakdancing game B-Boy set up by former employees of the legendary studios Codemasters and Rare.

“They were in Leamington Spa, a lovely regency town I only really discovered in my second year when I moved into a house off-campus,” Darren said.

Over eight weeks, Bowen was trusted with coding a new project management application, impressing the bosses so much that they offered him a full-time job as an IT engineer and junior programmer immediately after graduation.

“I found myself in a small team, working closely with everybody and realising that this sort of collaborative culture was actually what I wanted to work in instead,” he said.

Circumstances had combined to kickstart a career in gaming, but that perhaps should have come as no surprise, given Leamington’s reputation in the industry.

“Probably about 80 per cent of students on my course wanted to go into video games,” Darren said.

“Even then, the town’s nickname was Silicon Spa and lots of entrepreneurial people had splintered off from those early companies like Codemasters to start new businesses.

“The specialised courses at Warwick have helped fuel the industry’s growth here, because they give local companies access to talented graduates in things like coding, audio design and the arts.”

At FreeStyleGames, Darren soon led a team of programmers responsible for developing the tools needed to create cutting-edge games in an increasingly competitive, booming marketplace.

And in 2008, the company was taken over by global giant Activision, the publishers of massive so-called ‘AAA’ franchises like Call of Duty and Tony Hawk’s.

Suddenly, Darren and his colleagues were co-developing some of the world’s most loved games, all from a town of just over 50,000 people – more than 2,000 of whom work in the industry.

“Leamington Spa was an especially fantastic place to live when I was in my twenties, with great nightlife, nice parks, good restaurants and everything you could ever need,” he said.

“But with the wider West Midlands area, you’ve got a really diverse place; big cities, rural scenery, pretty villages, and also more affordable places to live after you graduate.

“So many of the people I work with now studied at Warwick and stayed here after university, and it’s no surprise.”

In fact, after being made redundant by Activision following the poor commercial performance of 2015’s Guitar Hero Live, Darren opted to stay in Warwickshire too, co-founding Third Kind Games and becoming the new studio’s Chief Operating Officer.

“We co-develop games with the likes of Amazon, Blizzard and Microsoft; for example, we helped make Forza Horizon 4 run at 60 frames per second on Xbox, and we supported the porting of Sea of Thieves to PlayStation 5,” he said.

Things have gone full circle, with Third Kind Games – acquired by multinational developer Virtuos in 2024 – now tapping into the skills of the next generation of local graduates like Darren right on its doorstep.

There are more than 130 video game businesses in the West Midlands already, with ambitious new startups joining their number all the time.

And while the multi-billion pound industry continues to experience the turbulence of short-term peaks and troughs, Darren believes the future looks bright – especially in Warwickshire.

“There’s obviously a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence at the moment and how it could drastically accelerate our industry,” he said.

“We’re only scratching the surface when it comes to using AI as a tool to improve the depth and quality of games.

“Anyone who is studying in a related field at Warwick today will have an enormous advantage in the future, because roles like AI programming are going to be in such huge demand in places like Leamington Spa.”

Indeed, the town plays host to the yearly Interactive Futures conference, where local companies exhibit and network with bright minds considering potential careers in video games.

“There’s such a great community of creatives in the region and it’s the kind of place where you find yourself meeting someone in the industry all the time,” Darren said.

“Studying at Warwick was a great decision and led me to fall on my feet professionally at a young age.

“It’s sometimes easy to take for granted the fact that there aren’t many hotspots for video games in Europe – so Warwickshire will remain an in-demand place for investment, growth and creative development for a long time to come.”