To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the legendary game “Civilization”, we welcome Heather Hazen, President and Studio Head of Firaxis Games. Heather speaks with our own Daryl Ogden about her gaming journey: starting with building Flash(!) games for Cartoon Network, she went on to PopCap where she expanded the platform reach for games like “Bejewelled” and “Plants vs. Zombies”, and then became an Executive Producer at Epic for “Fortnite” when “Battle Royale” first launched.
As her own career has matured, the importance of a values-driven culture–mirrored in her own family’s dedication to yearly defining their values–became ever more central to how she anchors a successful studio. “You get to a point in your life where it’s like I want to be around people every single day that see the world similarly,” she tells Daryl, “and I felt like Firaxis was that place for me.” And in “Civilization VII”, she has found a game that is the ”the culmination of everything that [she has] learned throughout [her] career,” and she appreciates the “idea of being the steward of a brand, of a franchise… so deeply loved by our fans and our community.”
To download Valued Cultures’ report, “Winning Game Studio Culture in the Post-pandemic Era”: https://www.valuedcultures.com/game-studio-culture-report/
