Sunil Thankamushy MFA '01: Taking His Game Online

The career to date of Animation Workshop graduate Sunil Thankamushy MFA ’01 has been a series of dizzying leaps into the future of entertainment—leaps of faith that have brought him from Kerala, in India, to UCLA’s world-famous Animation Workshop, to his current position as a top creative executive in the explosively expanding field of interactive entertainment.

As an undergraduate physics major, Thankamushy was already contributing political cartoons to “Indian Express” and other national publications. When it came time to pick a profession, his avocation won the argument. What Thankamushy describes as “sheer pig-headedness” brought him, after a two year struggle to piece together the needed scholarships, to UCLA. Although he assumed that his future lay in feature animation, he won his first job while still working on his TFT thesis project in 1996, at the brand new DreamWorks Interactive division, animating dinosaurs for the “Lost World: Jurassic Park” video game. And with that, his life changed: Thankamushy was electrified by the experience of seeing creatures he had created and endowed with a rudimentary form of Artificial Intelligence, taking on a life of their own.

Thankamushy’s growing responsibilities, first as a lead animator and then animation director for DreamWorks, and for the company that eventually absorbed it, Electronic Arts, on hit games such as “Medal of Honor” and “Medal of Honor Frontline” led to the creation in 2002 of Spark Unlimited, a company he co-founded that soon became known for turning groundbreaking concepts into fast-paced action adventures.

Spark’s first game, “Call of Duty: Finest Hour” (2004), was a WW2-themed first person shooter. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (2006) went a bold step further: it was an alternative history actioner in which an isolationist United States sat out WW2—only to be invaded and occupied in 1953 by a victorious and technologically advanced Third Reich. (Players are guerrilla soldiers in the American resistance movement.)

And in the brand new Legendary, which hits stores September 30, all the monsters of myth and legend, from Gryphons to werewolves, have been locked away for centuries in Pandora’s Box. At start of play, the box is opened—in contemporary mid-town Manhattan. “High caliber ordinance meets beak, talon, fang and claw in awe-inspiring fire fights,” according to Spark’s website. The game carries an industry rating of “M,” for Mature, and, Thankamushy says, “it wasn’t even play tested with teenagers. It’s intended to be a game for adults, as intense and scary as we could make it.”

The animation director on “Legendary” was also a UCLA alumnus, Kevin Scharff MFA ’97.

This year Thankamushy made another risky leap, departing from the company he helped create to form DEEPBLUE Worlds, Inc, which will partner with an Indian conglomerate in a transition to the still developing arena of social networked virtual online worlds. His goal is specifically to create online environments that will fire the imaginations of young people, ages 6-14.

“This is the next evolutionary step in online entertainment,” Thankamushy says. “Players no longer merely move around in worlds created by others. They help to design and build those worlds — and to create their own identities.”

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