These seasoned industry professionals volunteer their time to help develop the numerous sessions at Austin GDC. They work to ensure that the quality of the content provided to attendees is high-level, relevant, and timely. Their dedication is critical to the success of the conference. Read below to find out about the members of the Austin GDC 2008 Advisory Board.

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Corey Bridges, Co-Chair (Online)
Co-founder, Executive Producer and Marketing Director, Multiverse

As executive producer and marketing director, Corey oversees business development and developer relations with thousands game development teams, ranging from garage developers to Fortune 100 companies to Hollywood legends. Under his guidance, Multiverse has won multiple awards, including the "Red Herring 100" award for playing a leading role in innovating the technology business.

Corey brings marketing experience from some of the most influential companies in the high-tech and entertainment industries, including Netflix, Netscape, Zone Labs, Borland and The Discovery Channel. He specializes in market creation and growth for new categories of products. Over the years, he has also built and launched a number of world-class technology platforms.

Corey created the original launch plan for the popular security program ZoneAlarm, whose Internet-only distribution strategy captured 35 million users worldwide. In 2003, he was invited to contribute to a U.S. Homeland Security task force on Cyber Security. As a member of the original launch team for Netflix, Corey pioneered a new methodology of Internet-based marketing that identified, secured and grew the initial market of customers critical to the survival and success of the now-public company. A pre-IPO employee at Netscape, Corey worked as product manager for the company's flagship Internet browser.

Corey also has written and directed a number of short films, and produced commercials and TV specials. An award-winning writer, he has also collaborated with well-known technology expert John Dvorak on multiple books. He has spoken internationally about the future of virtual worlds. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

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Randy Buck (Audio)
Audio Director, Midway Studios Austin

I found the audio path through playing and singing in bands. I always liked playing in bands because it constantly challenged me to become a more skilled player. I learned about live sound as a result of having to deal with one too many crappy PA systems. Doing live sound brought me to Austin, the live music capital of the world, where I had the opportunity to branch out into production and post-production audio for film and video. A short but successful venture as an independent post-production service led me to my destination of the last fifteen years, game audio. In the ever-changing landscape of game development, I’ve found a place to apply all of my audio experience and to challenge myself to evolve my skills on a daily basis. It’s just like playing in a band only now it’s forty people instead of four.

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Lev Chapelsky (Writing)
Co-Founder and GM, Blindlight Studios

Lev Chapelsky is a founding partner and general manager for Blindlight, a Hollywood-based production services company that works exclusively for the video-game industry, providing game producers with consultative advice on working with outsource talent and production resources, as well as a full-service producer of outsource project work. Blindlight’s core service disciplines include story development, script writing, celebrity acquisition, and voiceover production.

Since its founding in 2000, Blindlight’s client list has grown to include 19 of the top 20 game publishers. Blindlight’s projects range from the Halo, Splinter Cell, and Elder Scrolls series to Star Trek, CSI, Open Season, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Lev holds a B.F.A. degree from Notre Dame, an M.B.A. from UCLA, and a degree in International Business Management from The Stockholm School of Economics.

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Richard Dansky (Writing)
Manager of Design/Writer, Red Storm Entertainment

The author of the upcoming novel Firefly Rain, Richard Dansky is the Manager of Design for Red Storm Entertainment and the Central Clancy Writer for Ubisoft. He has worked on video games such as Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Red Steel, and Far Cry and the Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series. An executive of the IGDA's Game Writers Special Interest Group, he is also one of the contributing authors of the critically acclaimed Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames.

Previously, Richard wrote four novels and worked on more than a hundred role-playing game books for White Wolf Game Studios. His published work also includes short fiction as well as literary criticism, book and music reviews, humor, and a now-defunct column in a Korean-language video game magazine. (Don't ask him—he doesn't know how he got that one, either.)
He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife Melinda Thielbar and their two inevitable cats. You can find him online at http://www.snowbirdgothic.com.

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Matt Firor (Online)
President, ZeniMax Online Studios

Matt Firor is general manager of Hunt Valley, Maryland-based ZeniMax Online Studios where he is working on MMORPG projects. Matt is a 20 year veteran of online game development. Prior to ZeniMax Online, he is best known for his work at Mythic Entertainment, where he was one of the founders and worked for over 10 years.

At Mythic he was the producer of the world-wide #1 smash hit Dark Age of Camelot, a MMORPG considered one of the most influential online games of all time. When he left Mythic in 2006, Matt was VP of product development and was responsible for all development projects at the company. In 2006-07, he was a consultant in the online gaming industry as president of Ultra Mega Games, LLC.

Matt is a graduate of George Washington University. He has lectured at the University of Virginia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology on game development topics, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Matt has written articles for Game Developer magazine and was a regular columnist covering online game development for the Korean gaming magazine Onplayer.

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Dana Fos (Writing)
User Experience Manager, Microsoft Game Studios

Dana Fos entered the video-game industry in 1993, taking a job as editor in the games group at Microsoft. With some 30 titles behind her, and a dozen or so ahead, she is now a Microsoft Game Studios User Experience Manager. With an impressive staff of novelists, screenwriters, and dedicated game editors, she works with developers on story development, script writing, user interfaces, voiceover, and localization, as well as on designing and implementing the processes and tools those disciplines require. Her primary professional objective is to convince the developers and writers she supports to rethink the presentation of game story and smack it silly as opposed to tweaking it at the pace of biological evolution.

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Raph Koster (Online)
President, Areae, Inc.

Raph is the president of Areae, Inc., a developer of virtual worlds, and the author of the widely acclaimed book A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Paraglyph 2004). He previously worked as chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment, creative director for Star Wars Galaxies, and lead designer of Ultima Online and UO: The Second Age. He also maintains a popular website at http://www.raphkoster.com which houses notable writings such as the Online World Timeline and the Laws of Online World Design.

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Linda Law (Audio)
Vice President, The Fat Man

Yet another engineer who left it for the arts. -What was she thinking? After wasting eleven years as a mechanical engineer on tasks such as performing structural analysis on 30-foot tall liquid sodium cooling pumps for fast breeder reactors and designing high-speed machinery, Linda started wasting time instead on managing The Fat Man game audio business.  For the last sixteen years she has worked in that capacity as both a business and project manager.  In 1996 she co-founded Project Bar-B-Q, the interactive audio think-tank, and established its working group process.  She continues to be one of the three principals involved in hosting that conference.  In 2006, she and her partners launched Project Horseshoe, -aimed at solving game design's toughest problems.  Linda is also the chairperson of the IASIG's Interactive XMF working group and a former chair of that organization.  She plays the bass almost competently and will surely shoot you a look if you ask her to solo.

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Jessica Mulligan (Online)
COO, ImaginVenture SA

Jessica Mulligan is an online game professional with over twenty years of industry experience at all levels of management. Currently Chief Operating Officer of ImaginVenture, a virtual world start-up in Lugano, Switzerland, she was recently a consultant to Sunflowers GmbH of Germany and the Board of Directors for Nevrax and Executive Producer of Saga of Ryzom for Nevrax - Paris. Her past positions include Executive Producer and Creative Director at Turbine Entertainment Software on the Asheron's Call franchise, the Director handling in-game events and story in Ultima Online for Electronic Arts, Director of Operations for MM3D Inc on the Middle Earth Online game and positions with AOL, National Videotex and Interplay Productions, among others, in various executive and management roles.
 
A respected author and commentator on online games, Jessica is the co-author of "Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide" with Bridgette Patrovsky, which has been published worldwide in several languages, including Chinese and Korean. She was also the author of the influential bi-weekly industry opinion column, Biting the Hand (www.skotos.net/articles), between 1997 and 2003. Jessica has served on the Board of Advisors for the Austin Game Developers Conference since 2004.
 
She can be contacted at mulligan@sunflowers.de or jessica.mulligan@gmail.com.

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Dave Murrant (Audio)
Director of Service Groups Sony Computer Entertainment America

Dave is the Director of Service Groups for Sony Computer Entertainment America and as such manages the music, sound, cinematic, motion capture and multimedia groups within Sony. Dave, originally from the UK, is a 15+ year veteran of the video game industry and has worked on a vast array of different games on all platforms. Dave has been with Sony for the past five years and has worked on all of the major franchises, SOCOM, God of War, Syphon Filter, MLB, NBA, ATV, Jak and Daxter and numerous others.

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Susan O’Connor, Chair (Writing)
Game Writer, Susan O'Connor Writing Studio

Susan O’Connor has been writing stories for games since 1998. Her portfolio features over 20 titles in a variety of genres, including first-person shooters, action-adventure titles, and open-world games. Her client list includes Activision, Ubisoft Montreal, THQ, Take-Two Interactive, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, and Vivendi.

She has been a speaker at several industry conferences, including GDC, the Montreal Game Summit, the Vancouver Game Summit, and the Austin Film Festival. In 2005, she founded the Game Writers Conference, now a part of Austin GDC. Her work has been featured in Gamasutra, Edge, and OXM. In 2006, she was a co-recipient of the DICE Best Character award for Gears of War; in 2007 she was a co-recipient of the GDC Best Writing award for BioShock. She is currently working on Far Cry 2 and an unannounced project for Radical. She lives in Austin Texas - and yes, she wears a cowboy hat in the summertime.

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George Alistair Sanger (Audio)
The Fat Man--Music and Sound Design for Games

The Fat Man, George Alistair Sanger, has been creating music and other audio for games since Thin Ice for Intellivision in 1983, which means that, with only one known exception, he has been in that business longer than anybody.  He is internationally recognized for having contributed to the atmosphere of well over 250 games, including such sound-barrier-breaking greats as Loom, Wing Commander I and II, The 7th Guest I and II, NASCAR Racing, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, and ATF.  He was recording orchestral instruments for games as early as 1992, and shoving lyrics, music videos, and digital recordings into games wherever they would fit, often volunteering to do the more advanced work for free in order to raise the quality of the player's gaming experience.  He wrote the first General MIDI soundtrack for a game, the first direct-to-MIDI live recording of musicians, the first redbook soundtrack included with the game as a separate disk, the first music for a game that was considered a "work of art," and the first soundtrack that was considered a selling point for the game.  Most of this was done alongside his friends, the three other composers of Team Fat.  For several years, Team Fat's music and sound effects dominated the American PC scene.  Musicians were frequently directed by their employers to imitate Sanger's work rather than that of artists in other media--a phenomenon that resurfaced recently with the sound design Sanger has done for slot machines. 

Sanger joined as the 21st member of the IGDA in 1994.  In 1991, at the first GDC awards show, the audio award went to Sanger's Wing Commander.  Sanger established the first audio column in Game Developer magazine in 2001.  Sanger was honored with the 2007 Developers' Choice award for Community Contribution. 

In 1995, he was the first music producer to be accepted into the National Recording Academy based on his work in games rather than in CDs, film, or movies.  He worked toward the goal of establishing a Grammy category for games, first alone, then years later in the group led by Chance Thomas. 

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Marc Schaefgen, Chair (Audio)
Studio Audio Director, Midway Studios – Austin

Marc Schaefgen has been kicking around the industry for 16 years, graduating from Origin University in 1993 with a Bachelor's Degree in the Audio Arts. Teaming up with another former member of Origin they founded Midian, an audio production company specializing in game scores and sound design. A couple of years later, he hooked up with then Iguana Entertainment, which became Acclaim Studios. Before the demise of Acclaim, Marc took an opportunity to work with some former colleagues from Acclaim to head up the one man audio department for Inevitable Entertainment. Inevitable quickly grew and was acquired by Midway in the fall of 2004. With that came about much positive change and the Midway Studios-Austin audio team continues to grow and forge ahead into the challenges of next generation console audio development. These are very exciting times!

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Scott Selfon (Audio)
Senior Audio Specialist Microsoft’s XNA Developer Connection (XDC) Group

Scott Selfon is the senior audio specialist in Microsoft’s XNA Developer Connection (XDC) group, focused on assisting composers, sound designers, and audio programmers with technical and creative implementation issues in their Xbox and Windows titles. He has played an active role in the development of the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT) and other Microsoft game audio tools and technologies, and has authored numerous technical and aesthetic white papers on interactive and dynamic audio techniques.

In addition to performing as principal violist with several Seattle area orchestras, Scott has composed music for a wide range of media, including film, television, Windows and Xbox titles, and live performance. He is the co-author of DirectX Audio Exposed: Interactive Audio Development (Wordware), winner of the 2003 GANG Best Audio Publication award. Scott is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, and is also a lecturer with the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring program, where he teaches courses on sound design and implementation for interactive media.

He also coordinates/teaches a two-day “Audio Boot Camp” tutorial at the annual Game Developer Conference. Scott is an alumnus of the University of Southern California, where he received dual degrees in Computer Engineering/Computer Science and Music Composition/Film Scoring.

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Lori Solomon (Audio)
Marketing Manager, Dolby

In her role as sr. partner marketing manager, Lori Solomon evangelizes Dolby technologies throughout the game community. She is responsible for connecting with game developers, publishers and peripheral makers to create co-promotional programs. Since joining Dolby Laboratories in 1996, Lori has launched programs with many companies, including Electronic Arts, Activision and Astro Gaming. She also oversees the company's gaming trade shows and events.

Lori graduated with a bachelor's degree in theater arts with an emphasis in sound design from San Francisco State University.  In addition to holding a position on the Austin GDC advisory board, she is also a member of the International Game Developers Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to building the video game industry and advocating digital game creation and the Game Audio Network Guild.  In her spare time, she enjoys playing Super Monkey Ball and is an avid fan of all things Mario.

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Michael Steele (Online)
Vice President of Product Development, C3L3B Digital

Prior the founding of C3L3B Digital, Michael was a vice president at Emergent, a leading game industry technology & service provider. He has also been privileged to hold positions such as Executive Producer at Ubisoft’s online division, ubi.com, where he built the online MMO operations team and infrastructure for ubi.com (Shadowbane, Uru: The Ages Beyond Myst). Before this he was the Vice President of Technology for Turbine Entertainment (Asherons' Call), Director of Development for Hasbro/Microprose and Director of Engineering for Disney Online.

Michael has also been a consultant to game developers and publishers of massively multiplayer online subscription services, specializing in the practical analysis of online games, identifying the effects of social networks, communities and other emergent phenomena. He has been making games professionally since 1989.

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Mark Terrano (Writing)

Founder and Design Director, Hidden Path Entertainment

Photo and Bio coming soon...

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Matt Tullis (Audio)
Product Manager, Games, Dolby Laboratories

As the game product manager for Dolby in North America, Matt manages the development of new technologies, tools, and services for the game market. Previously he worked with game developers to implement Dolby technologies in a variety of games on various platforms.  This includes Dolby Digital on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox and PC, as well as Dolby Pro Logic II on the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Wii. When Matt isn’t assisting game developers or creating a new product category, he can be found playing the latest Madden NFL game.

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Rich Vogel (Online)
Co-Studio Director, Bioware

Rich Vogel has been doing game development for 15 years. His first five years was doing console development for CD-I, Sega, and PS-1. He started his online career as Senior Producer of Meridian 59 where he helped launch and run the live service. He left 3DO to join Origin in 1997 as Senior Producer of Ultima Online where he helped launch and run the live service for two years. He is currently co-Studio Director at BioWare Austin. Previously he was V.P. of Production at Sony Online Entertainment in Austin, and Executive Producer of Star Wars Galaxies. In 2000, Rich joined Sony Online Entertainment as Executive Producer and founded the Austin Studio. He shipped Star Wars Galaxies in 2003 and the first expansion Jump to Lightspeed in 2004. Rich speaks frequently on issues of online world design, online development process, and online community management.

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Gordon Walton, Co-Chair (Online)
Co-Studio Director, Bioware

Gordon Walton has been authoring games and managing game development since 1977. He is currently co-studio director at Bioware Austin.  Previously he was VP/Executive Producer and Studio Manager at Sony Online Entertainment in Austin, working on an unannounced product and Star Wars Galaxies.  Prior to joining Sony Online Entertainment, Gordon was VP/Executive Producer of The Sims Online at Electronic Arts/Maxis and in the same role for Origin Systems managing Ultima Online™: He also served as Senior VP and General Manager of Kesmai Studios where he oversaw the development several MMOGs including Air Warrior™ and Multiplayer Battletech™. Gordon has owned and managed two development companies and was development manager for both Three-Sixty Pacific and Konami of America, Inc.  He has personally developed over thirty games and overseen the development of over 200 games.  Gordon is a regular speaker at industry gatherings.

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