Bastiaan 'Checker' Frank

Bastiaan 'Checker' Frank is a former Level Designer and self-proclaimed "crazy click monkey" for Digital Extremes, and is currently employed by Epic Games, working on the Unreal and Gears of War series.

Bastiaan Frank

General Information

Born in 1980, Bastiaan was interested in creating environments for most of his life. Starting out with Unreal's editor and a set of tutorials from a Dutch PC-game magazine in his late teens, it wasn't until Unreal Tournament that his maps started getting attention and recognition. It wasn't long before he was approached by Digital Extremes to do contract work for Dark Sector (which was designed to be an mmo using Unreal Engine 1.0 at the time). He took the job after finishing high school, but when DE got the task to make the Xbox version of Unreal Tournament 2003 (what later became Unreal Championship), Bastiaan was assigned to the UC team and moved to Canada to work on-site. Other DE titles he worked on were UT2004, Pariah and the renewed Dark Sector.

In May, 2007, Bastiaan was hired by Epic Games, where he got to squash bugs on the last Unreal Tournament 3 maps. With more level designers now working on a map, Checker is now mostly involved in creating lay-outs rather than visuals and meshes. Hie has made several lay-outs for multiplayer maps for Gears of War 2, as well as the lay-out of UT3's DM-KoosBarge.

List of Contributions

External Links

• Checker's portfolio and blog
• Interview with Bastiaan