Portal Designer, Kim Swift, Joins Xbox

There are only a handful of games that I’d argue are perfect, and I don’t let that be said too often. One of them happens to be Valve’s only good game, Portal. Since then some have tried to replicate that brilliance, including designer Kim Swift, and it never really works. It’s kind of annoying how games about momentum and solving something can never really be replicated. 2D Sonic games, Portal, and Spider-Man 2 (for the PS2) are all great games and all are about momentum. Well, who knows what is next for Portal designer, Kim Swift?

Our team focuses on three pillars in our games: Community, Innovation and Inclusivity. Today, @K2TheSwift joins us in XGS Publishing to accelerate our Innovation and collaborate with independent studios to build games for the cloud.

Welcome to the team, Kim! pic.twitter.com/pM3E5Xxyrt

— Xbox Game Studios Publishing (@XboxPublishing) June 21, 2021

Oh, me that’s who. Announced Monday, the designer has left the now-shuttered Google Stadia development projects to join Xbox Game Studios in their future ventures. Swift’s recent history has been a bit of a strange one, following her time at Valve she worked on Quantum Conundrum, a Portal-like published by Square Enix and it just never hit the right chord. Even with Q (John de Lancie) lending his voice to the project, it lacked that lightning striking the same spot. From there, Swift moved from studio to studio, beginning with joining Amazon in 2014.

In 2017 Swift would join EA and jump into the role of design director at Motive, developing Star Wars Battlefront II (the loot box one). During her time at EA, she’d reportedly work on Amy Hennig’s canceled Star Wars title, codenamed Ragtag. Later on, she’d join Google Stadia once again as design director until the internal studios would be closed this February. This closure created what was a bit of fleeing from the ship as it went down, with Jade Raymond leading several Stadia staff to some kind of Haven. Pun fully intended there.

As noted in the tweet above, the jump to Xbox is one to help smaller independent studios make games for their still infant Cloud gaming system. So no, there is no big ambitious plan to have a new Portal-like on the horizon.