Noah Falstein
President – The Inspiracy
Noah Falstein began his career in game development in 1980. Since then he has worked in a wide variety of roles, including programmer, writer, project leader, producer, creative director, executive producer, and most frequently, designer. Falstein was among the first ten employees at Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts Entertainment), The 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive. He was project leader for the classic arcade game Sinistar, the PC titles PHM Pegasus and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and co-designer of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Falstein frequently gives talks and teaches classes around the world, often on subjects involving game design, creativity, and interactive storytelling.

Since 1996 Falstein has run The Inspiracy (www.theinspiracy.com), a consulting firm specializing in game design and production assistance for entertainment and serious game titles. His clients have run the gamut from entertainment (Sega, Disney, Dreamworks Interactive, LucasArts Entertainment) to corporate (Intel, BP, Shell Oil), to serious game developers (Health Media Lab, Hopelab, Vision-Play, Medical Cyberworlds) to government (NIH, DARPA, FAS). His most recent design work has included the Cisco Mindshare Game, the Mata Hari Adventure Game from DTP, and design review of the upcoming Alan Wake game from Remedy.

John Northan
Director of Technology – Pandemic Studios
As Director of Technology at Pandemic Studios, John is involved in studio-wide tech leadership. He has been observing engineering behavior in the games industry for twelve years. He began life in the industry as an Artificial Intelligence engineer at BlackIsle Studios in 1997. Since 2000, he’s been at Pandemic Studios where he has lead the Battlefront and Mercenaries 2 engineering teams. John is highly interested in crafting high quality/productivity engineering teams and believes that it’s mostly about getting the right people on the bus. Unfortunately, it’s also then mostly about a dozen other things…

Michael John
Senior Creative Director – EA
As a Creative Director at Electronic Arts, Michael John (“MJ”) contributes to a wide variety of projects, initiatives, and educational programs. While he occasionally answers the siren song of game design (having recently shipped Spore Hero for Wii as its Creative Director), he also leads the company’s internal design education program, presently focused on senior designers and creative directors.

In a prior life, MJ has had design leadership roles on several multimillion sellers including the original Spyro the Dragon series, and Daxter and God of War: Chains of Olympus for PSP. He also briefly created and ran a studio in Los Angeles funded by Sony. In 2002, along with Mark Cerny, he co-authored the speech and article regarding game production that came to be known ‘Cerny Method’. MJ has also been a speaker at the DICE conference, and Game Developers Conference.

Michael Saladino
Senior Producer – Pandemic Studios
Michael Saladino is a senior producer at Pandemic / Electronic Arts working on the Mercenaries franchise. He is also part of EA’s world-wide community on Lean and Agile development methodologies and has been touring EA studios bringing these ideas to other teams. Over his six years at EA, he has been a development director on numerous games including Medal of Honor: Airborne, Lord of the Rings Conquest and Goldeneye Rogue Agent. Previous to EA, he was a development manager at Microsoft in their publishing group where he was able to work with great 3rd party companies including Epic, Dice, DoubleFine, Radical, and Valve. Michael’s roots are in software engineering where he spent nine years moving between small start-up developers including Presto Studios, Volition, and Mobeus Designs.

David Steele
Sr. Director, Worldwide QA – EA
Dave began his QA career in 1980 at Hewlett Packard where he performed Product Reliability Analysis and then joined the games industry in 1991 as a QA Manager at Sierra On-Line. He left Sierra in 1997 to join the games group at Microsoft as a Test Manager and has been at Electronic Arts since 2002. In current his role as Sr. Director of QA for EA Worldwide Dave manages QA Teams in North and South America, Europe and Asia. Dave led the efforts in creating remote test centers in Baton Rouge Louisiana and Buenos Aires Argentina and currently manages distributed test efforts across a combination of 12 different test locations. Dave is credited on numerous titles included The Sims, Battlefield, Asheron’s Call, Rock Band, Spore and Tiger Woods Golf across all gaming platforms.

Clinton Keith
Certified,Scrum Trainer – Clinton Keith Consulting
Clinton Keith is an independent Certified Scrum Trainer with 15 years of video game development experience. Clinton introduced the game industry to Scrum in 2003 and has coached teams at dozens of game studios. He is the author of “Agile Game Development with Scrum” which will be published in 2010. His website can be found at www.ClintonKeith.com.

Paraluman Cruz
Producer/Designer – Boomzap Entertainment
Paraluman (Luna) Cruz is a producer/designer for Boomzap Entertainment. She entered the game industry in 2002 as the head story writer for Anito: Defend A Land Enraged, the first Philippine-made computer game (Independent Games Festival 2004 finalist), while working at independent studio Anino Games. She served as senior producer for Anino Games for five years, working on PC casual games. For Boomzap Entertainment, she provides production, writing, and design for casual game projects. She is currently designing and producing a casual adventure game for a major US publisher.

Luna is a board member of the Manila chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). She teaches game design part-time at De La Salle University, Manila, and has spoken on game development in different conferences and universities around the Philippines.

Justin Quimby
Quimby Heavy Industries
Justin Quimby started his career in the game industry at Turbine in 1998, coding gameplay systems for Asheron’s Call 1.  During his eight and a half years at Turbine, he worked on all of Turbine’s MMOs, including Asheron’s Call 2, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons and Dragons Online.  After leading the engineering effort for Dungeon and Dragons Online, Justin spent three years as a Development Direction at Maxis/EA working on Spore.  Justin now runs Quimby Heavy Industries, a consulting company specializing in architectural software and social gaming on Facebook and mobile platforms.  Aside from games, Justin pursues a deep interest in dirigibles, jetpacks, and other retro-futuristic transportation technologies.

Kane Minkus
CEO – SomaTone Interactive Studios
Kane is one of the founding members of SomaTone Interactive Audio, one the largest game audio production companies in the world today. He has been the executive producer on over 600 soundtracks between games, films, records and interactive media campaigns. With a passion for building businesses, he was one of the founding strategists for the design of Pyramind: Digital Production Arts Training Academy, a premier digital production school, COO and founding partner of Franklin Digital Properties, a web business management firm, EBIVE Entertainment, an artist production company, and executive coach for Fearless Wealth, an investment education company. Kane continues to consult with CEO’s & executive teams on leadership skills, as well as, leads workshops in the Bay Area on sales, negotiation, leadership and entrepreneurism.

Kane holds an Associates Degree in Finance from the University of Illinois, a BM in Music Business and Music Production & Engineering from Berklee College of Music, and a Masters in Audio Production from Expressions School for New Media. He has also completed masters training in Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a Laban Bartenieff Movement Analyst and has extensively studied with Landmark Education (Leadership and Communication Training Corporation), California Leadership Center (a Fortune 500 Executive Consulting Team) and Fearless Wealth (An Investment Education Group).

Patric Palm
CEO – 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 management used in game development and publishing as well as within IT, telecom and the space industry. Patric also serves as board member on a number of non-profit organizations and is an instructor within the Swedish Air Force.

Ben Geisler
CEO, Frozen Codebase LLC
Over past decade, Ben has worked at three AAA development houses: Raven Software (Madison, WI), Frozen Codebase (Green Bay, WI) and Radical Entertainment (Vancouver, BC). He has worked on more than six best selling games. He has also been involved with publisher relations at Vivendi Universal Games, THQ, Konami and Activision. His past credits include Soldier of Fortune 2, X-Men Legends, Jedi Knight 2, Quake 4,The Incredible Hulk: UD, Elements of Destruction, Zombie Wranglers and Scarface. Each of these games has gone on to be a critically acclaimed success. Currently Ben and his team are working on the upcoming Metalocalypse: Dethgame, published by Konami and featuring one of the most popular cartoon shows on Adult Swim: Metalocalypse.

Ben continues to be involved in academics and the study of game development .  Past publications from earliest to most recent include a wide variety of game research and practical applications. Publications include a book article for “AI Game Programming Wisdom 2″ entitled: “Jumping, Climbing and Ducking: Getting More Out of Your Navigation System”. Ben has a Bachelor’s of Science and a Master’s of Science in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin. His coursework focused on artificial intelligence but also included a study of agile development methodology. In his master’s thesis he developed machine learning software which was integrated into Soldier of Fortune 2.

Ben founded Frozen Codebase in 2006 as a contracting studio specializing in programming.  Shortly latter, funded by an investment round from NEW Capital, Ben formed a team to begin full service XBox 360 video game production.   Today, Ben has seen his studio grow from five employees to over twenty five.  Frozen Codebase today focuses on XBox 360, PS3, Wii and iPhone titles both for the retail and downloadable markets.  As managing partner of Frozen Codebase, Ben serves as it’s Executive Producer and President.  He oversees two production teams and works hands on with all disciplines within the studio.

Jeff Charvat
Sr. Development Director – EA
Jeff Charvat started in the game industry in 1988 as a lonely QA tester for Broderbund Software. He rose through the engineering ranks working on the original Prince of Persia games and eventually managed a staff of engineers working on Carmen Sandiego titles and Riven: The Sequel To Myst.  Riven was his first experience of taking the reins of a team at full speed.
Jeff followed up that with a stint at Maxis to help manage the development teams that created the original The Sims and The Sims Online.  He joined The Sims shortly before their breakthrough moment at E3 in 1999.  That team went from full speed to over clocked.
From there, he moved south to EA Los Angeles where he led even larger teams creating Medal of Honor console titles.  Originally brought in to help with the RTS titles, Jeff was asked to take over the reins of Rising Sun and, again later, on Airborne.
Jeff will combine those experiences and those he has learned from brilliant people he has worked with into one presentation entitled, “Taking the Reins of Team at Full Speed.”

James Schmalz
President & Founder – Digital Extremes
James started creating games at the age of 12.  His first game was an Ultima clone called Sorcery that he created on an Apple IIe computer.  He received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo, but rather than venture down the traditional engineering path he made a name for himself creating shareware blockbusters like Epic Pinball. James founded Digital Extremes in 1993 with an idea of revolutionizing the 3d gaming world. 16 years later Digital Extremes continues to develop exceptional video games on all major platforms.

Toby Allen
Producer – Sumo Digital
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 and Super 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.

Karen Clark
Sr. Project Manager – EA
Karen Clark has been in the software industry since 2001. She began her career at Xinet, where she spent several years working in Technical Support, QA, and Project Management. She joined Linden Lab to work on Second Life in 2005, serving as build engineer and release manager before moving on to manage projects for the development team.

She joined EA in 2008 as a project manager at Bioware Edmonton. In 2009, Karen returned to California where she now serves as Sr. Project Manager for the EA Online Global Online Platform team.

Karen is a Certified Scrum Master and an advocate for Agile methodologies including Scrum and Extreme Programming. She also has a great passion for mentoring and career advancement in the video game industry. As Mentor Program Chair for Women in Games International, she founded GameMentorOnline to provide mentoring for students interested in entering the industry.

Scott Crabtree
Engineering Manager – Intel
Scott Crabtree has been making video games for over 20 years, and professionally leading the design and development of games for over 12 years.  Scott started as a Software Engineer and has also served often as a Game Designer and Producer.  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 Gem Drop and Shape Shifter for mobile phones.  He joined Intel in 2005 and currently manages a team focused on advancing video game technology.  He would love to hear from game developers about what sample code they would most Intel to deliver.

Barry Caudill
Executive Producer – Firaxis Games
Barry has worked in the industry since 1998, is a graduate of the University of Phoenix, and an accomplished musician. He entered the game industry through product testing at the Microprose studio in Hunt Valley before joining Firaxis as Quality Assurance Manager in 2002. In 2003, Barry was asked to become Sid’s producer for the remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates. In 2005, Barry was promoted to Senior Producer of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, where he combined his intuitive leadership skills and extensive industry knowledge with a great deal of patience, to inspire and motivate the development team to create one of the highest-ranked PC games of all time. Shortly after that release he was promoted to Executive Producer but kept his hand in individual project production by working with Sid again on Civilization Revolution for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo DS. Now he sits comfortably in an ivory tower issuing decrees and being fanned by dancing bears while plotting new ways to take over the world.

Chris Hecker
definition six, inc.
Chris focuses on solving hard problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology. He is an outspoken advocate for pushing the current boundaries of design and interactivity, in the hope that games will eventually achieve their full potential as a medium. To this end he helps organize the Indie Game Jam and the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and his recent work has centered on using proceduralism and artificial intelligence to enhance player creativity and agency. Chris has been on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference for many years and is a regular speaker at the GDC, Siggraph, and other conferences. A frequent contributor to Game Developer magazine, Chris was the technical columnist for the magazine for two years and the Editor-at-Large for three, and is currently on the editorial board of the computer graphics research publication, The Journal of Graphics Tools. He has worked at both ends of the development spectrum, as a one-man indie game developer with his company definition six, inc. and on a hundred-person team at Maxis/Electronic Arts. His professional goal is to help games become the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century. His current project is SpyParty, an indie game about subtle human behavior and deception.

Marta Daglow
Daglow Consulting Group
Marta Daglow is an Independent Games Recruiter with 18 years of experience in our industry, and has filled hundreds of games jobs with top talent over the last two decades.  She has recruited for all levels of jobs in Tech, Art, Design, Audio and Production for game companies ranging from indie developers to global publishers.  Before founding her recruiting practice, she worked in management roles inside traditional companies ranging from Sunkist Growers to Charles Schwab, creating programs in recruiting, training, outplacement and employee relations.   Marta’s two decades of games experience and work with startups, Inc 500 and Fortune 500 companies gives her a unique perspective on recruiting, training and team development in the global technology industry.

David Edery
Founder – Fuzbi, LLC
David Edery is Founder and Principal of Fuzbi LLC, a consulting firm focused on the business and design of video games. Prior to founding Fuzbi, David was the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, and an Associate Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program before Microsoft. David is also the author of the recently-published book.

Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business. He has published articles in the Harvard Business Review and several game industry publications. David maintains a blog called Game Tycoon.

Alexander Fernandez
CEO – Streamline Studios
Alexander L. Fernandez serves as Streamline Studios’ Chief Executive Officer and is one of the four founding members of the company. Since 2001, he has grown Streamline Studios into the world’s leading co-production and production management studio for interactive entertainment by constantly raising the bar in terms of quality, process, and innovation.

Alexander has been a key component in Streamline’s success and has directed the studio as it has delivered AAA content for several best-selling franchises, including Gears of War, Saints Row, Ghost Recon, Unreal Tournament and James Bond. He works diligently to develop the core strengths and abilities of the studio, placing special emphasis on developing high-level relationships within the industry and implementing long-term company strategies for success. A major part of this success has been developing Streamline Studios into a globally recognized brand and making the studio a fabulous place to work.
In addition to his duties at Streamline, Alexander is fully involved in serving the industry by participating as a board member of BGIn, the Benelux Game Initiative. He is Business Development Director for the European Games Developer Federation, and holds advisory board positions with the Games Developers Conference Europe, and Game Connection.

Joshua Caulfield
Executive Director – IGDA
Joshua Caulfield is the Executive Director for the IGDA. A veteran association professional, Caulfield is focused on building the value of membership in the IGDA. Prior to working in associations, he obtained an MBA from The American University and a Bachelors of Science from Babson College with a Marketing and Economics dual major. Caulfield’s work experience has been a combination of executive management and the application of technology to community experience. Applying social media and internet technologies to trade and professional associations is more than a vocation, it’s a habit. When not engaged on behalf of the IGDA, he teaches a course in event marketing at the Northern Virginia Community College as an Adjunct Faculty member, and is a prolific writer and speaker.

Jennifer Long
CEO/Managing Partner – Management:  Possible
Jennifer is Managing Partner of Management: Possible, a leader in executive skills development performance coaching. Jennifer has a 20-year track record in training design, production, delivery and the development and refining of its proven coaching methodology. In addition to her on-going involvement in course development and design, she also continues provide program training delivery and coaching to ensure program content relevance and keep current in workforce development.  Jennifer has designed and developed learning programs for large organizations such as British American Tobacco, AT&T, United Artists, Ford Motor Company and Northrop Grumman in additional to programs for smaller business. She is considered an industry expert in corporate coaching and has written and contributed articles to industry trade publications such as the ASTD Infoline series as well as Chief Learning Officer magazine. Jennifer has presented at the Chief Learning Officer Summit, Linkage Organizational Development Summit and the Conference Board among others. Jennifer remains passionate about keeping the experience of Management: Possible learning dynamic and relevant.

Jeremy Mayes
Director of Game Production – Arkadium
Jeremy Mayes is the Director of Game Production at Arkadium, a leading game solutions developer in New York City, where he leads a large team of artists and programmers both in New York City and Simferopol, Ukraine. He is primarily responsible for designing and creating Flash based casual games (both original titles and Advergames) for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses. Jeremy is also one of Arkadium’s lead game designers and actively contributes art and animation to various projects.

Jeremy was previously Creative Director at Skyworks Technologies where he managed a large team of game artists and outside consultants. For the last ten years Jeremy has worked on nearly a hundred web games, downloadable games, several Nintendo GBA and DS games and mobile games.

Chris Natsuume
Creative and Business Director – Boomzap Entertainmen
Christopher is an internationally known and award winning designer, producer, and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience managing teams, building companies, and designing hit games that have sold millions of copies worldwide. A US citizen with years of international experience in Europe and Asia, he holds an MBA from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. In his role as Co-Founder and Director of Boomzap Entertainment, he is a proud employer of the best damn developers in Southeast Asia.

Megan Gaiser
President & CEO – Her Interactive
As president and CEO of Her Interactive, the pioneer in interactive entertainment targeted towards female play preferences, Ms. Gaiser is responsible for short and long term corporate strategy as well as day-to-day operations. Under her stewardship, Her Interactive has experienced continued growth and achieved combined sales of more than seven million units worldwide for the company’s Nancy Drew PC game franchise. The series has garnered 17 consecutive awards for excellence from the respected Parents’ Choice Awards and for the last three years has been the #1 PC adventure franchise in units in the US. Megan was named one of the “Game Industry’s 100 Most Influential Women” by Next Generation.

Prior to joining Her Interactive in 1997, Ms. Gaiser spent eleven years as Editor and Producer of several award-winning documentaries as well as corporate, educational films and public service announcements. She then went to Microsoft Corporation as producer of CarPoint, the company’s first online-specific product. She is the recipient of over fifteen Cine Golden Eagle awards, three New York Festival awards and the International Documentary Milano Award.

Brett Douville
Lead Systems Programmer – Bethesda Softworks
Brett Douville has been in the industry for nearly 12 years. He began his career at LucasArts, where he contributed to Star Wars: Starfighter, and acted as Lead Programmer on Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter and Star Wars: Republic Commando. After a few years as a game programming consultant, he joined Bethesda Softworks, where he currently serves as Lead Systems Programmer. He also maintains a blog at www.brettdouville.com

Phillip Rosedale
Founder & CEO – Linden Lab
Philip Rosedale founded San Francisco-based Linden Lab in 1999, and hasled the creation of the virtual world of Second Life from initial concept to a market-leading virtual world, with a robust economy and a global population.

As a pioneer in the virtual world industry, Rosedale is actively involved in the strategy, development and design of Linden Lab’s products, including the world of Second Life and the Second Life Grid platform.

Rosedale is known for his entrepreneurial approach to new technologies, starting a network software company when he was 17. In 1995 he created an innovative internet video conferencing product, which was later acquired by RealNetworks, where he went on to become Vice President and CTO. In 1999, the advent of consumer broadband and better PC 3D graphics inspired Rosedale to leave RealNetworks and found Linden Lab, pursuing his lifelong dream of creating an internet scale virtual world.

Rosedale holds a BS degree in Physics from the University of California at San Diego.

Brian Robbins
Founder/President – Riptide Games
Brian Robbins is Founder and President of Riptide Games, a startup indie game developer in Denver, CO focused on next-gen mobile platforms. Since the start of his career in gaming Brian has always been at the forefront of emerging markets. As a programmer he has developed over 100 games for PC, web and iPhone. He is an active contributor to the IGDA having co-founded the Casual Games SIG and is a former chair of both the Casual and Online Games SIGs. He has also contributed to multiple local chapters and currently serves as coordinator for the Colorado IGDA chapter. In 2006 Brian received the IGDA MVP award for his contributions to the community.

Brian has a BS in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Denver. He lives in Denver with his wife and their 3 year old daughter. He is particularly proud of his daughter’s proficiency in Plants vs Zombies where she likes the “purple eating ones.”

Samantha Ryan
Senior Vice President, Development and Production – Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Samantha Ryan, Senior Vice President of Development and Production for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (WBIE), oversees the development and production teams responsible for all of the company’s videogames, including those based on original properties, Studio franchises and outside licenses, from inception through release.  Upcoming WBIE titles include Scribblenauts and Scooby-Doo First Frights. Recent games also include F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Watchmen: The End Is Nigh.

Previously, Samantha held the position of President and CEO of WBIE’s wholly owned game developer Monolith, where she continues to serve as CEO.  Monolith’s titles include, the critically and commercially successes F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins.  Monolith is known for high quality games including No One Lives Forever I & II, Tron 2.0, Blood I & II and Alien vs. Predator 2.

Samantha holds a background in both production and marketing. Her experience in entertainment marketing encompasses projects for Infinity Broadcasting and the Singapore Broadcast Corporation in Southeast Asia, as well as promotional campaigns for the Miller Brewing Company and Frito-Lay. While at Monolith, Samantha produced the acclaimed No One Lives Forever series before moving into her senior management roles.

Chris Satchell
Chief Technology Officer – International Game Technology
As Chief Technology Officer at International Game Technology, Chris Satchell is responsible for the strategic and tactical technology vision at the global leader in the design, development, manufacturing and distribution of gaming machines and systems. In the CTO role, Satchell also has direct responsibility for the Information Systems group, R&D, the Advanced Architecture group and IP strategy and management.

Most recently, Satchell held the position of Chief Technology Officer for the Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) at Microsoft, where he was responsible for technical strategy and execution across the gaming business at Microsoft; Xbox, Games for Windows, Xbox Live and Microsoft Game Studios. Satchell was also directly responsible for all Microsoft game development platforms and services through the XNA organization. At Microsoft since 2002, he held roles as the General Manger and Chief Software Architect for XNA,  Director of Engineering for Microsoft Game Studios, Development Manager for Studio RX and the Racing Studio. While at MGS Satchell worked on critically acclaimed franchises such as Project Gotham Racing, Rallisport Challenge, Forza and Fable.

Prior to Microsoft, Satchell has a long history in games development; serving as an Executive Director at The 3DO Company, Technical Director for Silicon Dreams ltd and an Artificial Intelligence specialist and Project Leader for Eidos Interactive PLC. In previous lives Satchell has been an engineer on Safety Critical Railway Systems, conducted post-graduate research into distributed artificial intelligence systems and been a strangely happy barman in Britain’s longest bar. He now lives in Las Vegas trying to remember what pine trees and rain are.

Dean Takahashi
Lead Writer – Gamesbeat
Dean Takahashi is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. He previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. He has written about the video game industry for more than 13 years and he has written about technology subjects for more than 20 years.

Mark Voorsanger, CPCC
Mark is leadership coach and consultant.  His business experience includes 25 years of entrepreneurship, team leadership and business management in both small and mid-sized companies.  Prior to founding Skyward Coaching & Consulting, Mark served as VP of Production Studios for the educational software and toy company LeapFrog Enterprises; as Senior Producer at Maxis/Electronic Arts, and co-founded and managed (with game designer, Greg Johnson) the game development studio ToeJam & Earl Productions.

Today, Mark coaches individuals from top-level executives to mid-level sales managers to individuals in career transition and trains cross-functional production teams in collaborative process improvement and communication.  Mark is a certified professional coach (The Coaches Training Institute, CTI), has completed CTI’s ten-month intensive Co-active Leadership Program, and holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Don Daglow
Interactive Entertainment
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.”

Dan Connors
Telltale Inc. Chief Executive Officer, Director, Founder
Dan Connors co-founded Telltale, Inc. in 2004. As Chief Executive Officer, Dan has overseen Telltale’s growth, establishing the company as a leader in digital publishing and episodic production. During this time, Telltale has launched more than twenty products on PC, Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii, working with high-quality licenses such as CSI, Sam & Max, Aardman Animations’ Wallace & Gromit, and Strong Bad from HomestarRunner.com. Most recently, Dan and the Telltale team introduced the first new adventures in nearly a decade for the landmark Monkey Island series with the monthly Tales of Monkey Island series.

Dan has worked in the video game industry since 1993, in roles including producer, director, and executive. His credits include Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, X-Wing: Alliance, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. In 2008, he was recognized by Develop magazine as one of the top 25 people reshaping the games business.

Christian Svensson
Capcom Entertainment – Corporate Officer and Vice-President of Strategic Planning & Business Development
Christian Svensson is currently Corporate Officer and Vice-President of Strategic Planning & Business Development at Capcom Entertainment. He also participates on the board of directors of the PC Gaming Alliance and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. In the past he has been Vice-President of Entertainment Publishing at Midway Games, CEO of Xion Solutions, Inc., CEO of MCV USA, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Next Generation Online. He is a graduate of Bucknell University.

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