ABOUT GDC  

Ian is an engineering graduate who founded his first software business in 1989 and has been leading businesses in the games and technology sectors ever since. This has included a 4 year spell as CEO of Kuju Entertainment, an IPO, several trade sales of businesses and various fund raising activities. Ian was also Chairman of TIGA, the UK game developer's trade association, for 4 years. Ian is now a Partner at Tenshi Ventures, an investment and consultancy group specialising in early stage companies in the games and technology sectors.

Louis is the vice president of studios for Zynga. Louis was formerly the CEO of InstantAction, an IAC company, and co-founder of Westwood Studios and vice president of creative development at Electronic Arts Los Angeles. As part of the management team, Louis helps direct EALA's programming, artwork, audio, and research & development departments, as well as contributes to studio business strategy. Louis was the general manager of Westwood Studios from 2000-2003 and served in creative, business and finance roles while growing Westwood from two employees in 1985 to over 250 in 2002. In his creative roles, Louis has contributed as executive producer, creative director, technical director, programmer and artist to over 100 games created by Westwood and EA over the past 23 years including best selling original franchises such as Command & Conquer, Lands of Lore and Eye of The Beholder as well as block buster licensed original products including The Lord of The Rings- The Battle for Middle Earth II, The Lion King, Blade Runner and Monopoly.

Halldor joined CCP in 2005 as CTO, bringing nearly a decade of experience in various software engineering and programming roles at Atari/Midway, Electronic Arts and Maxis.

As lead programmer or key contributor for a number of console games for systems ranging from Nintendo 64 to Sony's PlayStation2 and Microsoft Xbox, his list of credits include the highly successful Sims 2 and Sims: Bustin' Out. His commitment to improving the development process at CCP is evident with the continued success of EVE Online. Halldor holds a B.Sc. degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Iceland.

As vice president and general manager for WB Games Seattle, Laura Fryer oversees game development for the Warner Bros internal studios in the Seattle area, including Snowblind Studios, which is currently working on Lord of the Rings: War in the North.

Prior to WB, Laura was an executive producer for Microsoft Games Studios, where she was responsible for shipping Gears of War and Gears of War 2. An industry veteran, Laura was one of the first members of Microsoft Game Studios in 1995. As a producer, she shipped several games including the classic Crimson Skies and Microsoft's first massively multiplayer game Fighter Ace. She also conceived and produced Microsoft's first release of Zone.com.

Prior to her return to MGS in 2004, Laura was director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, and a founding member of the Xbox project. During her tenure, she cultivated worldwide Xbox Developer Support, launched XNA, created the Xbox Advisory Board, and ran Xbox game developer events around the world.

Laura was named one of The Hollywood Reporter's "Top 12 Most Influential Women in Gaming," one of Next Generation's "Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women," and Gamasutra's "Top 20 Women in Games."

An avid gamer, Laura enjoys taking "video game vacations" to play video games in marathon all-day sessions. Her other hobbies include reading, gardening, juggling, and playing with her dogs.

Clint Hocking entered the game industry working for Ubisoft Montreal in July of 2001, when he began his career as a Level Designer, Game Designer and Scriptwriter on the original SPLINTER CELL. Along with writer JT Petty, Clint was honoured for his writing work on the title with the first-ever Game Developer's Choice Award for Excellence in Scriptwriting. Clint continued as Lead Level Designer, Scriptwriter, and Creative Director on SPLINTER CELL: CHAOS THEORY – the highest rated Splinter Cell to date with an aggregate review score of 94%. Clint then worked as Creative Director on the innovative and acclaimed FAR CRY 2. In 2010, Clint left Ubisoft and moved to San Francisco where worked as a Creative Director at LucasArts. He is currently working as a designer at Valve in Seattle.

Before games Clint worked in the web industry and experimented with independent filmmaking while earning an M.F.A in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. He maintains a blog at www.clicknothing.com.

As Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.'s senior vice president of game design, Rob is dedicated to ensuring that each Blizzard Entertainment title offers the high-quality entertainment experience that the company has built its reputation on. Leading a group of talented and highly experienced development teams, Rob supervises the design and implementation of gameplay and story features for every Blizzard game. Rob has been contributing to the success of Blizzard's games since 1997, when he joined the company as a designer and strike-team member on the original Starcraft. After being named lead designer on the Starcraft expansion set, Starcraft: Brood War, Rob went on to serve in that role for the development of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos; its expansion set, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne; and also Blizzard's largest undertaking to date, World of Warcraft. The latest Blizzard title to reach players under his leadership was the World of Warcraft expansion set, The Burning Crusade. In his current position, Rob continues to oversee all aspects of game design for World of Warcraft and its upcoming second expansion, Wrath of The Lich King, as well as Blizzard's other games in development, including the highly anticipated Starcraft II. Rob earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in criminology, law, and society from the University of California, Irvine in 1996.

Siobhan Reddy is studio director at Media Molecule, the game developers responsible for the hugely successful and innovative LittleBigPlanet. A fascination with technology, pop-culture and entertainment started with her first job at Spike Wireless in native Australia. At 18, she relocated to the UK and entered the games industry as production assistant with Perfect Entertainment on DiscWorld Noir. Siobhan joined Criterion games in 1999, and as producer of Airblade, Burnout 3 and Burnout 4 she consistently shipped titles on time and of the highest quality.

In April 2006, seeking a new challenge and the opportunity to be part of a close-knit team, Siobhan joined newly founded Media Molecule, working alongside directors Mark Healey, Alex Evans, Dave Smith, Kareem Ettouney and Chris Lee.

At GDC 2009, Siobhan's work on LittleBigPlanet was recognized with the production award at the first ever Microsoft Women in Gaming Awards.

Siobhan continues to produce ground breaking, innovative work whilst managing a studio of the industry's most highly creative, passionate and talented people.

Justin Thavirat is a senior art director at Blizzard Entertainment and has been working in the video game industry since 1994. Justin got his start in games when he answered a local job posting at school that read, "Do you like to draw and play video games? If so, please send your resume and portfolio to Blizzard Entertainment." Since then Justin has enjoyed contributing game art, concept art, cinematic art, and marketing illustrations for many of Blizzard's games in the Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft series. Most recently Justin was lead artist on World of Warcraft, art director on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and is currently art directing Blizzard's unannounced massively multiplayer online game. In recent years, Justin enjoys collaborating with art schools and instructors in developing their curriculums for the next generation of game developers and artists.

Alan is vice president, artist & repertoire, and a founder of ngmoco:). As the company's liaison to the creative community, his responsibilities include evaluating and signing game concepts and ensuring ngmoco's collaboration with the world's best and most innovative game makers.

In 2004, Alan joined Neil Young at Electronic Arts. He was the director of creative affairs for EA Blueprint, a creative management group focused on developing and producing new properties across various media in a coordinated and connected fashion. Prior to Blueprint, he was director of artist & repertoire at EA Los Angeles and Maxis.

He worked for the Game Developers Conference from 1995 to 2004. He was executive producer and director the last five years of his tenure.

Alan is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

He's obsessed with and always looking for the next great idea.

Chris is an engineering lead at Bungie where he is responsible for technical vision and game engine research. This involves equal parts of architecture design, hardware wrangling, and wild-eyed ranting about the future convergence of CPUs, GPUs, 4G, HMDs, and the cloud. Currently he is working on Step 7 of Bungie's Master Plan.

In his eight years at Bungie, Chris has witnessed its evolution from independent developer to a first-party studio within Microsoft Game Studios and now back to an independent developer. During this time he has helped lead Bungie's engineering team by developing artificial intelligence, graphics and networking technologies for the Oni and Halo series. He holds a master's of science in computer graphics from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Mark Cerny is a true veteran of the video game industry, known both for the success of the titles to which he has contributed and the variety of roles that he has performed on them. During a career spanning nearly thirty years, Mark has worked as game designer, programmer, and producer, in arcade games and console games, and in the U.S. and Japan.

He designed and programmed 1984's Marble Madness for Atari coin-op, and at Sega he oversaw the creation of Sonic The Hedgehog 2. While President of Universal Studios' game division, he worked in a variety of production and design roles on the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro The Dragon series on the original PlayStation. In 1998, Mark established Cerny Games as a consultancy, and has since participated in the creation of the Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank series on PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation 3 titles Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance II and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. He has also been instrumental in the creation and guidance of the ICE team, a technology group based at Naughty Dog that specializes in graphics systems and tools for the PlayStation 3.

In 2004 the IGDA honored Mark with its Lifetime Achievement Award, calling him a master collaborator and a jack of all trades. In 2010 the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences inducted Mark into its Hall of Fame as its 13th member.

Rod Fergusson is the executive producer for Epic Games' blockbuster Gears of War franchise (see www.gearsofwar.com). Rod led the production of Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) and the 2006 Game of the Year, Gears of War (Xbox 360, PC), in addition to collaborating with creative talent on the Gears of War novels, comic books and film. Rod joined Epic in 2005 after a 10-year career with Microsoft, which included seven years as a producer within Microsoft Game Studios. While there he produced a number of game projects including MS Train Simulator, Blood Wake and Counter-Strike (Xbox).

Jeff recently capped off 15 years in the video game industry by serving as the technical art director on Volition's Red Faction: Guerrilla. He works as a senior technical artist at Volition, helping to define and create better pipelines for the artists and improving game visuals. Jeff has worked with tools providers like Autodesk and ATI, along with numerous community sites such as www.scriptspot.com, www.area.autodesk.com, and www.tech-artist.org, to promote technical art and contribute tools and tutorials to help others in the industry. In 2007 Autodesk awarded Jeff an Autodesk Max Master award in recognition of his contributions to the Max user community.

Soren Johnson is a Design Director at Zynga, working on browser-based gaming. Previously, he worked at EA2D as lead designer on Dragon Age Legends. Soren joined EA Maxis in 2007 to work on Spore as a lead designer/programmer. Prior to that, he spent seven years at Firaxis where he was the lead designer and AI programmer for Sid Meier's Civilization IV. He also programmed the AI and was co-designer of Civilization III. Soren writes a design column for Game Developer Magazine. He holds a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University. His thoughts on game design can be found at www.designer-notes.com.

Lee Petty has worked in the game industry in a wide variety of art production and art leadership roles since 1996. Lee has shipped numerous console and PC titles at companies such as Accolade, Infogrames, and Crystal Dynamics. Lee is currently at Double Fine Productions, where he served as the art director of 2009's Brutal Legend and project lead on 2011's Stacking.

Adam 'Atomic' Saltsman is an independent game designer, artist, programmer, and entrepreneur whose past projects include TrashPaint, Fathom, Cave Story Wii, Paper Moon, and Owl Country. Adam is a co-founder of Semi Secret Software (Gravity Hook HD, Canabalt, wurdle), the director of Last Chance Media (Dr. Dobb's Challenge 2), and is currently working on iPhone and Flash games until he runs out of money.

Steve fell in love with computer animation in the Dark Ages, in more ways than one. He dropped out of a Ph.D. program in Ancient History to start rendering 3d scenes on the Brown University mainframe. Steve went pro in the early '90's, doing animations for a variety of commercial and television projects. His first game job was building mechs and environments for FASA's MechCommander in 1995.

In the subsequent 15 years Steve has worked on some of the most well known titles in the industry. He worked as an artist and animator on Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike. In recent years he's specialized in art tools and pipelines, first as the artist-in-residence for the Granny animation system, then as the technical art manager at Zipper Interactive (SOCOM 3 and M.A.G.) and technical art director at Bungie (Halo 3). He's currently the technical art director for Undead Labs. Steve writes the Pixel Pusher art column for Game Developer Magazine and appears frequently at GDC and other games industry events.

Scott Selfon is a senior development lead in Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group (ATG), where he manages developer education, support, and advocacy efforts across Microsoft gaming platforms and technologies. He is also ATG's senior audio specialist, assisting composers, sound designers, audio programmers, and game designers with technical and creative challenges in developing sound for games. In this position he played an active role in the development of the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT) for Xbox 360, Windows, and XNA Game Studio, as well as the XMA and xWMA audio compression formats, the XAudio2 audio rendering library, and audio input features of Kinect.

Scott is a member of the Seattle Composers Alliance and is on the advisory board of the Game Audio Network Guild (GANG), where he participated as a co-chair to help found the Interactive Entertainment Sound Developers (IESD). In addition to being on the faculty of the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program, he is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, where he developed and taught a senior-level undergraduate course curriculum on game audio through the Interactive Media department. He has coordinated and lectured at the Game Developers Conference's Audio Boot Camp tutorial sessions for nearly a decade, and has spoken at conferences worldwide on audio, interactive entertainment, and sound implementation techniques and technologies for interactive media.

The principal violist of the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra in Seattle, Scott has also composed music for a wide range of media, including film, television, video games, and live performance. He has arranged for the Baudboys (an award-winning a cappella group composed of Microsoft employees), and founded and directed an a cappella group at the University of Washington for seven seasons. He co-authored the 2003 book DirectX Audio Exposed: Interactive Audio Development (Wordware Publishing), and has received numerous industry awards for audio technology and publications.

Scott is an alumnus of the University of Southern California, where he obtained dual degrees in music composition (film scoring emphasis) and computer engineering/computer science.

Chance Thomas is a composer for videogames and film. He creates original music for some of the world's top IP – Avatar, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Marvel, and more.

Chance's work has been honored by the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, the GANG Awards, and many others.

His background includes tenures as Studio Audio Director (EA), Music Director (VUG), and Senior Music Producer (Sierra).

Chance currently contracts through HUGEsound.com, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Game Audio Network Guild.