LF10 Speakers
More speakers will be announced soon.
Alex St. John – President and CTO, hi5
Alex leads all product strategy, design, development and operations at hi5. Previously, he was CEO and co-founder of WildTangent Inc. the world’s largest privately held game network with over 30 million monthly unique visitors. During his tenure, WildTangent developed a unique and highly successful micro-currency based economy that blended ecommerce and advertiser sponsored play of premium content. Alex also pioneered technology for online game publishing, resulting in an extensive portfolio of rich media delivery and micro-currency based monetization patents.
Prior to founding WildTangent, Alex was responsible for Microsoft's multimedia strategy. He was one of the principal creators of Microsoft's DirectX technology, which become the foundation for all Windows multimedia applications, 3D graphics, media players, casual multiplayer games, and thousands of PC and Xbox games. Several books have been written about St. John's exploits at Microsoft including Renegades of the Empire by Michael Drummond, Opening the Xbox by Dean Takahashi, and Masters of Doom by David Kushner.
Alex was awarded an honorary degree in Real-Time Interactive Simulation from the DigiPen Institute of Technology for his extensive contributions to innovative game technology and the school’s curriculum. Alex also advises the University of Washington on ways to enhance its technical degree programs.
Alli Ottarsson – Senior Technical Director, CCP
Aðalsteinn Óttarsson began his career in 1999 as a web developer at OZ.com and its spin off virtual world company, Smart VR. In 2001, he joined CCP and built the internal and external web infrastructure to support the launch of EVE Online, the massively multiplayer online game (MMO). Soon after, Mr. Óttarsson took on the role of Web Cell Lead, leading CCP´s web development and billing solution efforts. Later, he was appointed Technical Producer in 2007, quickly becoming the primary catalyst for implementing scrum and agile development methodologies to CCP’s offices in Atlanta, Newcastle, Reykjavik and Shanghai.
This can be made longer, painted more global?. Perhaps about working in the different cultures and about being a popular speaker having appeard on Game Development Conferences in Europe, Asia and North America.
Ben Wibberley – Managing Partner, William Rubin Agency
As a co-founder and VP at Babel Media, for 12 years Ben worked with almost all of the key platform owners, developers and publishers in Europe and North America on QA strategy to ship hundreds of titles. In this QA Leadership focused talk, he will use this knowledge to illustrate not only the optimum structures, but also the benefits that an efficient QA department brings with knowledge and time to market, and finally how to use it to benefit your entire business.
Bill McGeHee – Senior Production Expert, Hansoft
As a Senior Production Expert at Hansoft, Bill is discussing project management and quality assurance best practices on an everyday basis with teams and studios around the world. Bill is able to draw on 15+ years of project management experience when counseling studios on how Hansoft can help them streamline projects and enhance their teams’ productivity and output. Prior to joining Hansoft, Bill was a Senior Development Director at EA Tiburon and has worked in various production roles on games such as Tiger Woods Online, EA Golf Challenge, Madden Superstars, Madden (PC), EA Gameshow, and EA|ON, as well as several unannounced titles. In addition to software development management Bill has many years of experience working as a project director on large scale themed entertainment attraction development for several international companies including most notably Universal Studios Parks and Resorts.
Clinton Keith – Certified Scrum Trainer, Clinton Keith Consulting
Clinton Keith, a Certified Scrum Trainer has over 20 years of professional development experience and 15 years in video game development experience. His games include Midnight Club, Smuggler’s Run, Darkwatch, Bourne Conspiracy and numerous others. Clinton introduced agile development methodologies to the video game industry in 2003.
Clinton writes about agile on his blog and will be releasing a book in early 2010 called “Agile Game Development with Scrum”. For any questions contact him at clint@clintonkeith.com or visit his website www.ClintonKeith.com.
Don Daglow serves as an independent Executive Game Producer, Game Designer and Speaker on all major game platforms. His work was selected for an Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering in 2008, honoring his creation of Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). He is one of only three game designers or producers (with id Software's John Carmack and Blizzard's Mike Morhaime) to be selected for a Technical Emmy and to accept an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Achievement Award. Electronic Games has called him "one of the best-known and respected producers in the history of the field," and in 2003 he received the CGE Award for "groundbreaking achievements that shaped the Video Game Industry."
Don served as president and CEO of Stormfront Studios for twenty years after founding the company in 1988, selling over 14,000,000 games and generating over $500,000,000 in retail and online game sales. Prior to founding Stormfront, he served as director of Intellivision game development for Mattel, as a producer at a small start-up called Electronic Arts, and as head of the Entertainment and Education division at Broderbund. At EA he produced two of the first three EA sports titles.
He designed and programmed the first-ever computer baseball game and first sports simulation in 1971 (now recorded in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown), the first mainframe computer role-playing game ("Dungeon" for PDP-10 mainframes, 1975), the first sim game (Intellivision Utopia, 1981) and the first game to use multiple camera angles (Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball, 1983). He co-designed Computer Game Hall of Fame title Earl Weaver Baseball (1987) as well as the original Neverwinter Nights for AOL (1991-97).
He was elected to the Board of Directors of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in 2003 and again in 2007. He serves on the selection committee for the AIAS Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund, on the Advisory Board for GDC Europe, on the Advisory Board for Women in Games International (WIGI), and on multiple committees for the IGDA.
Don also is a past winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities New Voices playwriting competition, and has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
He speaks extensively on the topics of game design, online and social media games, and the video games industry, and has delivered keynote addresses in Canada, Germany, the UK and the United States.
He holds a BA in Writing from Pomona College and an Ed.M. from Claremont Graduate University.
Ike Ellis – Senior Producer, Zynga
Joe Kreiner – VP Engine Licensing, Infernal Engine
Joe Kreiner is a games industry force. Previously an evangelist for 3D graphics, CPU, and peripheral technologies in gaming – he’s now focused on licensing for the Infernal Game Engine at Terminal Reality. His duties cover all aspects of the Infernal Engine, including business development, marketing, and direction. Past companies include Texas Instruments/3Dlabs, Cyrix, STMicroelectronics/PowerVR and most recently an eight year stint as business development and game developer relations for Logitech. In recognition of his contributions to the games industry, Joe has special thanks credits in more than thirty five titles spread over the last twelve years. Joe holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Penn State.
Jon Leslie – Senior Production Expert, Hansoft
Jon is a Senior Production Expert at Hansoft with the primary role of helping game studios and software development companies around the world leverage their Hansoft usage, taking their productivity to new levels. Jon uniquely combines his past 6 years of game production experience with over 11 years of enterprise software project management. He has held production roles at Microsoft Game Studios, Take-Two Interactive and EA, shipping titles such as Amped and Tiger Woods PGA Tour titles on various platforms. Most recently, Jon worked at Harmonix Music Systems as Sr. Producer on the Rock Band franchise.
Joshua Howard – Executive Producer, Realtime Worlds
Joshua Howard has been building, growing, and leading great game development teams for many years, most recently as the Executive Producer for APB at Realtime Worlds, and previously as the Senior Vice President of Online Development at Hidden City Games and Studio Manager for Microsoft’s casual games studio. Believing that great games come from great teams, and great teams don’t happen by accident, Joshua is always finding new ways to improve a company’s culture and make it easier for teams to focus on building world class interactive entertainment experiences. Find his various musings on management and leadership on his infrequently updated blog, http://thereisnothem.wordpress.com.
Kevin Rabun – Engineering Manager, Vicarious Visions
Kevin Rabun joined Vicarious Visions, as an engineer, in January 2006. Since January 2009, Kevin has held two management positions at Vicarious Visions, first serving as Tools Manager and currently as Engineering Manager. In the role of Engineering Manager, Kevin is responsible for project staffing, assessing and implementing policy and best practices, and providing growth and training opportunities for members of his group. During his first three years at Vicarious Visions, Kevin developed games for the Nintendo DS before moving to the Tools Group. Prior to joining Vicarious Visions, Kevin spent five years as an engineer for Electronic Warfare Associates (EWA). During his time at EWA, Kevin worked on weapon simulations and training software for various branches of the military. Kevin brings a developer-centric mindset to management because of his background as a software developer.
Kim Sellentin – Producer, SEGA Studios Australia
Kim Sellentin is a producer at SEGA Studios Australia. Armed with a software engineering background, Kim began her career 5 years ago in quality assurance, where her integrity and reliability saw her soon assume a leadership role. Since then, she has contributed to the production of Medieval II: Total War, its expansion, Kingdoms, Stormrise, and Sonic Classic Collection. Kim is currently overseeing the game production of a multi-platform sports title, which has yet to be announced.
A Certified ScrumMaster and agile enthusiast, Kim is focused on producing gameplay value, and has been a key figure in adopting and evangelizing Agile/Scrum practices throughout her studio. Kim’s passion is in facilitating creativity and leveraging cross-discipline teamwork, while on an endless pursuit of finding better ways to make great games.
Kim Pallister – Director of Content Planning, Intel – Visual Computing Group
Kim Pallister is Director of Content Planning for Intel’s Visual Computing Group. When not prepping the world for super-cool hardware, he blogs at www.kimpallister.com. He's written for various publications including Gamasutra and the Game Programming Gems series. Kim's been around the game industry for almost twenty years at companies like Intel, Microsoft and Matrox.
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.
Lucien Parsons – Head of Operations, 4mm Games
Lucien Parsons heads Operations for 4mm Games, creating the infrastructure and partnerships required to launch transformative games for both Triple A and www platforms. Prior to landing at 4mm, Lucien served as VP Operations at Zenimax Online Studios and as Executive Producer at Breakaway Games–a leader in the Serious Games space. Lucien's approach to the strategic management of innovative, global game platforms draws from his experiences managing large-scale software production projects for Fortune 400 clients across 4 continents and from his studies of Innovation Management and Marketing at the The Wharton School of Business and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University.
Patric Palm – CEO and co-founder, Hansoft
As CEO and co-founder of Hansoft, Patric discusses project management and QA best practices on a daily basis with clients in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. Hansoft is a production management tool used for agile and lean development, collaborative scheduling, real-time reporting, bug tracking / QA, workload coordination, portfolio and document. Patric is a frequent speaker at development conferences around the word, including keynotes at Develop in Brighton 2009 and Germany Scrum Gathering 2009. He also serves as board member on a number of non-profit organizations and is an instructor within the Swedish Air Force.
Scott Crabtree – Engineering Manager, Intel
Scott Crabtree has been making video games for over 30 years, and professionally leading the design and development of games for over 12 years. Scott started as a Software Engineer and has served as a Game Designer, Executive Producer, and Entrepreneur. Scott has spoken at the Game Developer's Conference and the International Game Developers Association Leadership Forum, been published repeatedly on Gamasutra.com, and served as technical editor for Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. Scott is proud to have developed games with companies including Microsoft, Mattel, The Learning Company, Disney, LEGO, Nike and more. His most recent published games include Yourself!Fitness and NRL Rugby League for PS2, Xbox, and PC, and Twist-Tac-Toads for the iPhone. He joined Intel in 2005 and currently manages a team focused on advancing video game technology, with a particular focus on hand-held and mobile platforms. He passionately studies human psychology, brain science, and the science of happiness.
Stephanie O'Malley Deming – Co-Founder & President, XLOC, Inc.
Stephanieis a software development producer, consultant and operations executive with over fifteen years experience in worldwide award-winning educational and entertainment products for companies including Activision, Electronic Arts, Lucas Arts, Capcom and 2K Games. She specializes in localizations and has successful sim-shipped hundreds of language versions of high profile titles including the Guitar Hero™ series, Rock Band™, the Call of Duty® series, the Tony Hawk™ seriesamong many others. Stephanie founded XLOC (www.xloc.com), a company that offers web-based applications for easy localization management, and works as a production consultant for interactive game companies.
Tim Huntsman – Senior Producer, Disney Interactive
Tim has been in the business of making video games for almost 20 years. He’s worked at a variety of companies, on a variety of franchises, for a variety of consoles. His work history includes the likes of Microsoft, Midway and Acclaim. He’s currently with Disney Interactive in Salt Lake City working on Pixar-related products. When not shackled to a computer, he’s busy with his family, playing guitar in a band, and spending way too much time trying to fix old guitar FX pedals.
Toby Allen – Producer, Sumo Digital Ltd.
Toby is an experienced producer with a background in QA and journalism which has lead him land his first industry role as an assistant producer with Sumo. His past experience in QA has given him a strong focus on quality, while his games journalism ensures he knows what the customers want.
From assistant producer to producer, Toby rose to work on many titles including Virtua Tennis 3, OutRun 2SP, Sega Superstars Tennis for Sega; New International Track & Field for Konami; Driver’76 for Reflections; Go' Sudoku 2 andSuper Rub A Dub for SCEE. His experience runs from next-gen development to handheld gaming; he’s worked on multiple genres including sports and racing games.
Toby’s latest production has been Sega’s top tennis franchise, Virtua Tennis 2009.
Toby Moore – Chief Technical Officer, Mind Candy
Toby Moore is the Chief Technical Officer at Mind Candy, where he oversees software engineering, systems architecture and scalability, external infrastructure and IT. Before joining Mind Candy he worked with a number of highly skilled teams to design, develop and launch disruptive products and platforms using the latest techniques in scalable web-based systems engineering. After a run of successful projects across the energy, retail, ISP and media sectors, Toby travelled through eastern Europe and Asia before joining Mind Candy, where he uses his skills to help design, launch and grow global success stories such as Mind Candy's Perplex City and their current project Moshi Monsters.
