Mike Acton and Andreas Fredriksson have joined Unity as Principal Engineers from Insomniac Games. They’re two AAA engine and performance experts who bring best-in-class expertise to Unity. Acton and Fredriksson will be based out of Unity’s new Los Angeles office in Burbank, CA.

“I have had the privilege of working in AAA games development for over 20 years and the honor of leading one of the most well-respected and talented internal AAA engine teams at Insomniac Games over the last 10+ years. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to produce some of the highest quality work in the space and what is required from an engine to meet those requirements.

Being the Engine Director at Insomniac Games is a position very few could walk away from, but when Joachim showed me what he and his team at Unity had been working on to take data-oriented programming and make it accessible to everyone, I knew that this was an opportunity to not only change how games are built, but set a new bar for engineering across large-scale projects everywhere. And that was an opportunity I just could not ignore. I’m excited to work with Joachim directly to help democratize data-oriented programming so that teams everywhere can achieve things only previously possible by a few dedicated groups.” – Mike

“Joining Unity is an ideal and logical next step for me. Working on Frostbite and Insomniac Games’ internal engine was very rewarding and challenging but, ultimately, the number of developers I could directly help was limited.

Unity is everywhere. It is impossible to have a conversation about engine tech and game development without someone bringing up Unity. This means a much bigger stage for me to inspire and lead from, which is exciting.

Besides programming cool tech at Unity, I want to continue reaching out to developers in conference lectures and blog posts to make a difference in the way people reason about performance and low-level programming.” – Andreas

Not only are we thrilled to see what we can build at Unity, we’re both going to be based out of Unity’s new Los Angeles office in Burbank, CA! We really couldn’t think of a better place to grow our careers and can’t wait to start working with the Unity teams and developers around the world.

– Mike & Andreas