What is GL33k?

 

GL33k is a collective of independent game audio developers who can divide-and-conquer many small tasks at once or unite as one, like Voltron, to tackle projects as large as they come. Our studio (super secret base and evil laboratory) is located on Congress Avenue, in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas.

We all have special skills, yet also all share a lot of cross-over as well. This suits us well when crunch time hits and we need to share the load. The other benefit is that we can send members of the team to work on-site, as many game studios prefer to do.

Whether a game needs a full audio team's worth of support or just one person, GL33k can make it happen. From working on-site on huge AAA Sony productions like Uncharted 3, to Facebook games like Triple Town, to a two-man bedroom operation in the U.K., we've made it work for all kinds of games.

Top

Matt Piersall

President and Founder

Audio Direction, Business Development
Sound Design and Music Production

matt@gl33k.com

 

Matt Piersall founded GL33k in 2005 with an old Pro Tools rig (Powermac 8600), a mini-disc recorder, and a dream. He fell in love with creating audio for video games, as it seemed to fill every niche in his interest palette. To be completely truthful, Matt was aiming for a career as a super star electronic music producer and his loving mother around the year 1999 told him that he should "do some music for those games you like to play". Matt being by far the smartest guy in the room told his mother "you're not the boss of me", but very shortly realized that maybe his mother was wiser than he.

He found himself studying music at the University of North Texas and some time after landed a job at FUNimation which got him in front of some great opportunities to do sound design for games. He left linear audio in search of creating dynamic experiences for players and has never looked back.

Bobby Arlauskas

Sound Designer and Composer

Sound Design, Integration,
Music Systems and Music Production

bob@gl33k.com
koexist.com

 

Bobby discovered his love of video games when Dad brought home the Atari 2600. As a teenager he picked up a guitar and played in bands until he discovered Propellerhead Software’s ReBirth software. This led him to playing in Laptop Battles in Dallas, where he met Matt and learned about game audio. Bobby finally got his break when Matt needed help on Metroid Prime 3, Bobby’s favorite Nintendo franchise.

Since starting with GL33k, Bobby’s taken on almost every role associated with the company, but settling into a role of being the defacto Unreal Engine and mobile games guy, as well as a go-to for creating music in a wide range of styles. He occasionally works on-site with local game studios such as Retro Studios and Junction Point.

In 2011, Bobby joined the inde developer Tiger Style Games as their sound designer and created the sound effects for Waking Mars, a game about exploring the caves of Mars and discovering alien life. Waking Mars was nominated for Excellence in Audio as well as Best Mobile in the 2012 Independent Games Festival. In 2012, Bobby became a speaker at the Game Developers Conference with the session The Metronome: How Everyone Has Rhythm.

Jimi Barker

Voice Supervisor, Sound Designer

Dialogue Engineering
Audio Integration, Sound Design

jimi@gl33k.com

 

James Barker has been around the GL33k dojo from the beginning. He grew up making stop-motion films out of his lego blocks and fashioning ninja swords out of golf clubs. His first video game was King's Quest 3 for the original Mac, followed shortly by a slew of games for the Intellivision. He took a semester of computer science in middle school, studying Basic, during which time he basically learned how to print a bunch of dirty words continuously on screen. At some point, his love of music and sound kicked in and he decided to try his hand at being a rock star.

Around 2003, while in school, he was first able to start combining all the things he loved (except for the ninja swords). He started providing sound and music for a few student projects and eventually landed a job as an ADR Engineer where he discovered his next passion, dialogue.

Now he is a core member of the GL33k squad, providing dialogue direction, audio integration systems, and sound design.

Katherine Hernandez

Audio Integrator and Composer

Audio Integration, Music Composition
Project Management

kat@gl33k.com

 

Katherine Hernandez was adopted into the GL33k family in 2009, where she focuses on audio implementation, project management, and composing here-and-there.

While working on degrees in Psychology and Child Learning & Development, she fell into the game industry by helping with student projects in 2008. According to Alfred Bandura's intrinsic motivation theory, her career path veered as a result of her infatuation of creating concepts into auditory experiences... which at that time, entailed creating a battlescape by use of staplers, pots and pans, and violently hitting her washing machine. Equally bizarre, her first piece, Squash Medley, sounded very much like a circus of mismatched vegetables... but it didn't matter- she fell in love.

Crazy enough, she probably met the members of GL33k before her rebirth, as she used to waitress at a restaurant they frequented in Dallas.