A few months after leaving Valve, Xbox co-creator Nat Brown has started a new position at Apple. Brown announced his new gig on Twitter Monday, writing: “I’m looking forward to continuing to work on my obsessions by focusing on all applications of graphics, and working with any of you using graphics on Apple platforms.”
Brown was part of Valve’s VR team until the company laid off more than a dozen staffers earlier this year. At the time, the company called those job cuts “an unfortunate part of business,” but insisted that they didn’t represent “any major changes at the company.”
Before starting at Valve in 2015, Brown had worked for a number of social media companies, including as CTO of iLike.com and vice president of technology for Myspace. In the 90s, he worked for 7 years for Microsoft, where he was part of a small group of engineers that created the original Xbox, at the time called “Project Midway.”
It’s unclear whether Brown will continue to work on VR at Apple; the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, Apple has been working on a mixed reality headset for some time, and is reportedly looking to launch the device as early as next year. Some of Apple’s other notable recent hires with VR expertise include Jaunt co-founder Arthur van Hoff and Sterling Crispin, the developer of the Cyber Paint VR app.