Employee Spotlight: Maarten de Koning

Maarten joined DDM in early 2013 as a Partner when his former company was acquired by DDM. With a background in investment management and game production, he worked in various key roles at different organizations in the Netherlands, such as investment firms and game development studios, before he founded his own agency which also provided representation to game developers.

Maarten oversees worldwide sales activities and client support for DDM’s development studio representation clients. In addition, he manages the business development teams in the United States, Europe and China.

His passion for games started with the Tandy “TV Scoreboard” Pong-like game console. Soon thereafter, Maarten jumped into the wonderful world of the Atari 2600, and more importantly, the C64, which sparked his initial interest in programming and creating games such as text-based adventures (as getting some basic graphics on the screen was already too hard for Maarten). From that point onward, Maarten was hooked. He enjoyed all-time favorites such as Prince of Persia, The Secret of Monkey Island and Doom. He was also a member of a local home-brew computer club where PCs were built and the very first LAN parties were thrown. Maarten had his own Bulletin Board System at that time to share guides, code snippets and so on with fellow nerds. Memories…

Fast forward. As programming was not Maarten’s biggest strength, he decided to focus his career on enabling developers to reach greater success by doing what they do best—making great games. Being an agent is in Maarten’s DNA and is by far his biggest passion. Besides work (which is also his hobby for those who don’t know), Maarten enjoys being a father and loves great food, wine and vintage Apple computers. And he is still a sucker for first-person shooters…