We all love (and sometimes hate) Apex Legends, we spend hours and hours playing every week, but, other than that one developer (Hideouts) who bans all the hackers, have you ever wondered about the development team who created the game? Who’s the person in charge that’s creating this beautiful world that we’re experiencing every time we play?
Of course, we’ve asked ourselves this question.
We all know that Apex Legends is a game created by Respawn Entertainment, a triple-A game development studio that created awesome games, like Titanfall and Medal of Honor. For this article, let’s dig a bit deeper into the Apex Legend project itself.
First, we want you to meet Mackay McCandlish, he was the design director for Apex Legends and the one who was in charge of project development overall.
The first videogame McCandlish developed was Perdition’s Gate, an unofficial commercial add-on for DOOM II that was released in 1996 where he was working as a designer. Since then he has been on projects like X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse, Quake, and even big games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault from 2002, but his career as a scriptwriter started with the Call of Duty saga, where he worked on Level Design & Gameplay Scripting for 5 whole games from 2003 to 2009.
In 2014 McCandlish joined Respawn where he was a designer for the Titanfall project. Let’s not forget about Titanfall’s achievements: even to this day, Titanfall 2 remains as one of the best FPS games of all time. Both its single-player campaign and multiplayer modes can go toe-to-toe with any of the other best options in the genre and come out on top.
Thanks to Titanfall’s massive success, they decided to launch this new game, a Battle Royal FPS that they started working on, even before Titanfall 2 was released, the game was developed by the same team that developed Titanfall (around 115 developers) and it only took them 21 months until the official release.
Apex Legends was released on February 4th of 2019 and it became an instant classic. In only 8 hours, 1 million people had already played the game. By the end of the first week, it had reached 25 million players, and then 50 million in the first month.
The rest is history. Apex Legends became one of the top games on all platforms for the past few years, even winning the BAFTA award for Best Multiplayer Game in 2020.
Nowadays, Apex Legends has 15 Seasons and it has grown a lot. The game has so many new and interesting features that despite all the new game releases we get every year, Apex is still among the top most streamed games on Twitch.
And of course, that means that other devs have joined the project as well, such as the second person we want you to meet, Steve Ferreira.
Ferreira started his career in 2004 as a Tester for Need for Speed: Underground 2. After only 4 years he had already worked on 10 games for the Need for Speed universe, where he was credited as a member of the Production Team for 4 of those games.
More than 10 years later, Steve joined the Apex Legends project as a Team Leader, gaining much respect due to his vision and becoming one of the most important devs at Respawn. Therefore, in 2021 after the co-founder of Respawn, Chad Grenier left, Steve became the Game Director.
Directing a team of more than 100 people is not an easy role, but he has successfully taken Apex Legends to the top of its popularity, becoming the most streamed battle royale game of 2022 on Twitch.
It’s likely that Apex Legends still has a few years in the limelight and we don’t really know what’s going to happen or when, but there is something we cannot deny: one day, it’ll come to an end. Hopefully, one that leaves fans content and satisfied with the journey they’ve experienced.
Apex Legends is truly an awesome game, everything looks gorgeous, the maps are so detailed that it’s mind blowing, and despite that we all know it’s flaws, we can truly see that these devs are doing their best.
Don’t forget to be thankful to McCandlish, Ferreira, and to the whole Respawn team that makes this happen.
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