Who We Are

Gaz Liddon - CEO

Gaz has been working in video games for nearly a quarter of a century and his software development experience dates back to the founding of seminal 8 Bit software house Thalamus.

Joining Probe in 1991 Gaz handled production management on the home console versions of Mortal Kombat bringing all 7 SKUs in on schedule for Mortal Monday, one of the most successful game launches of the 16 bit console era. While at Probe Gaz also made a major contribution to the companies expansion, helping build Probe to 150 people prior to its sale to Acclaim.

Gaz joined Climax in 1997, a UK based 25 person development team, to head up work on the critically acclaimed Playstation versions of both Diablo and Theme Park World. Moving from project management to first Group Development Director and then COO, overseeing all development activities in the group.

During his time Gaz was instrumental in founding of Climax’s Brighton Studio, expanding the group’s portfolio of projects and turning Climax into a highly profitable company turning over £16m per year.

Wanting to return to a more hands on role on game development Gaz left Climax in 2004 to found Xen Group, a development services company with the mission of working on great projects with a small team of highly talented staff to help produce games we can be proud of.

Gareth Noyce - COO

Originally hailing from commercial software development, Gareth worked as an engineer, project manager and consultant on numerous bespoke software and online applications for commercial and military clientele. This culminated in a role as technical architect for BAE Systems, where he spent three years working in the Asset Telematics and CS&S Groups.

In 2003 he joined the game industry as a tester for Climax Solent Ltd before moving to design. In February 2004 he joined Climax Group as Project Controller and worked directly with Gaz to oversee the measurement and tracking of project status for all projects in the group..

Together they worked on the Project Management standards and setup and successfully ran internal audits of at-risk projects. In addition, they developed a bespoke web-based system for the data-mining of project performance metrics, to provide early up-stream reporting of project risk issues and an interface for forecasts and invoicing. This was successfully deployed group-wide.

During late 2004 and early 2005 Gareth worked as a Producer at Climax Kingston before leaving to join Xen Group as COO.

He's also acting as an external consultant with Tampere Polytechnic, Finland for their Game Writing course.