Hogarth de la Plante

J.R. Hogarth de la Plante is a game developer who worked on production BioShock and BioShock 2.

Career
Hogarth de la Plante began creating games as a personal project in 1993 while attending high school in Buffalo, New York. After briefly attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, Hogarth began working as a junior graphic designer with his father - J.C. Hogarth de la Plante and began learning 3D animation software packages in his free time. Hogarth moved to San Francisco in 1996 and worked for an advertising agency as a print designer, and illustrator specializing in 3D rendering/visualization for print design as well as photo-retouching and special photographic post effects.

In 2001 he obtained a private pilot's license and became disillusioned with advertising as an outlet for his artistic ambitions. He moved to New Mexico to attend the Mesa Airlines Pilot Development program which he graduated from at the top of his class in 2003. He worked as a lighting assistant and retoucher for photographer Carter Dow in San Francisco afterward and became a First Officer on the CRJ Regional Jet with Mesa Airlines/America West Express in 2004. Hogarth flew the CRJ Jet out of Phoenix Arizona from 2004-2005 but continued freelancing as a graphic artist.

Game Design Work
From 2004-2005 Hogarth de la Plante took a freelance job working with Liquid Development where he started making assets and eventually became a team lead on numerous video game projects including "Mass Effect", "The Outfit", and "City of Villains". He eventually decided to go into videogame development full time, and in 2005 he was hired as an artist by Irrational Games. At Irrational Games he started as a modeler and later took on the role of Level Architect after helping to define the look and feel for both the Arcadia and Hephaestus levels.

After BioShock shipped in 2007, 2K Games decided to create a new studio, 2K Marin, in Northern California to create the sequel. Hogarth was asked to move back to the Bay Area as Lead Environment Artist on BioShock 2. He became one of the 6 founders of the 2K Marin studio, hiring and managing the the entire internal environment team, and working closely with the Lead Level Designer to develop the workflows and management processes that we used to create levels for BioShock 2. He also managed workflow in and out of the Shanghai studio (2K China), and provided environment art direction to Digital Extremes in Ontario as they developed BioShock 2 multiplayer. With the departure of 2K Marin's official Art Director during pre-production, Hogarth de la Plante took on the responsibilities of Environment Art Director for the duration of BioShock 2.

After BioShock 2 was completed, Hogarth de la Plante acted as a consultant to the direction team in charge of 2K Marin’s XCom project while also working as an Art Director on a team responsible for defining a separate unannounced new IP for the 2K Marin development studio. In February of 2012, he left 2K Marin to work for Microsoft, developing Microsoft Flight.