IMD Forum for 10/04/06: Jordan Weisman
Speaker: Jordan Weisman
Time: Wednesday, October 4, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Title: "Making things up for fun and profit"
Jordan Weisman has been a prolific game designer for over 20 years, creating role-playing, board, interactive site-based, and computer games that have won more than 50 design and marketing awards. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Interactive Media in USC's School of Cinematic Arts and co-teaches CTIN 558 Business of Interactive Media with Professor Mark Bolas.
Jordan is Chief Creative Executive of 4orty2wo Entertainment, and invented ARGs after having been inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame for games such as MechWarrior, MageKnight, Crimson Skies, and Shadowrun. Before founding 4orty2wo in 2002, Jordan served as Creative Director of Microsoft's entertainment division, providing creative leadership for the company's PC and video game portfolio (including the development of the Xbox). Jordan is also the founder/co-founder of FASA Corp., Virtual World Entertainment (makers of BattleTech), FASA Interactive, and WizKids, LLC.
Wikipedia Profile here and full bio after the jump.
BACKCHANNEL LOG here.
Bio:
Jordan Weisman has been a prolific game designer for over 20 years, creating role-playing, board, interactive site-based, and computer games that have won more than 50 design and marketing awards. In 1994 he was elected to the Academy of Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame, and in 2003 Weisman was the recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Pacific Northwest Region.
Weisman is a serial entrepreneur, having founded four companies. The first was FASA Corporation in 1980, where he designed such games as BattleTech/MechWarrior and Shadowrun. Weisman and his partners built FASA up and used it to fund Virtual World Entertainment which was founded 1987. VWE created the world’s first publicly available virtual reality immersive networked game in the form of dedicated entertainment centers, opening the first BattleTech Center in Chicago in 1990. After opening two centers in Japan in 1991, the majority of the company was acquired by Tim Disney and other Disney family members. Together they opened 30 VR entertainment centers around the world over the next four years.
FASA Interactive was founded in 1995 to take the role-playing company’s intellectual property catalog to the home PC environment. MechWarrior developed under license by Activision was already one of the top selling PC games of all time with 14 million copies of the series sold. After developing Mech Commander FASA Interactive was acquired by Microsoft in 1999. The entire development team moved to Washington and Weisman took the role of Creative Director for the entire Microsoft Entertainment Group. In that role he oversaw both the PC portfolio and the launch portfolio for the Xbox.
While at Microsoft he conceived of what is now called Alternate Reality Games, and led the team in the creation of the first such experience called The Beast for Steven Spielberg’s film Artificial Intelligence (AI).
After serving as the Microsoft Games Creative Director, Weisman founded Wizkids in 2000 to create the category of Collectible Miniature Games, which blends the benefits of a trading card game with the visual impact of tiny action figures. With titles such as Mage Knight, MechWarrior, and HeroClix the company has sold hundreds of millions of figures. Wizkids was acquired by Topps Inc. in 2003.
Weisman is currently Chief Creative Officer of 42 Entertainment, which is the leader of the rapidly growing field of interactive immersive story telling (or ARG), and has created such experiences as I LOVE BEES for Microsoft’s Halo II, and dozens of others.