Juan Pancho 'XceptOne' Eekels

Juan Pancho 'XceptOne' Eekels (or simply Pancho Eekels) is a Lead Level Designer for Digital Extremes. He joined the Unreal team halfway through development and has contributed to various games in the Unreal series and Digital Extremes' own franchises since.

Juan Pancho Eekels

General Information

Before moving to Canada to work for Digital Extremes, Pancho attended school in The Netherlands. He went on to work in a dental lab and did some freelance animation/modeling for a few years before applying for a job at DE. He kept on applying and was eventually hired to help work on Unreal, for which he made a few textures, models, animations and a lot of maps. After working on Unreal and Unreal Tournament he was named Lead Level Designer at Digital Extremes, where he made levels for Pariah, WarPath and Dark Sector. He also contributed to Unreal Tournament 2003 in between those projects, for which he made 6 levels: 3 of which were intially cut out due to performance issues.

Pancho says that Riven (the 2nd chapter in the Myst series) has inspired him enormously over the years. He also has "a weak spot for large desolate areas, with only one little micro world as the focus". This theme can be seen in both older (LavaGiant, Peak) and newer (ElecFields) levels of his.

List of Contributions

External Links

• Pancho's own website
• Interview on Darker Sector
• Pancho's profile on Polycount
• Interview @ Unreal Universe
• Another interview @ Unreal Universe