Jeff has held roles as a game programmer, producer, chief operating officer of a game development company, and most recently a group leader at Microsoft for the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms.  Jeff has shipped over 20 game titles and has worked on four different platforms bringing games in the Half-Life, Homeworld, and Lord of the Rings franchises to market in addition to many others.

By being Sierra Studios' first external producer in 1998, Jeff had atypical involvement in all elements of the publishing business including developer acquisition, contract negotiation, profit and loss planning, forecasting, production oversight, manufacturing, documentation, interaction with quality assurance, marketing, public relations, and many others.  When moving to WXP, an independent game development house, Jeff worked on the other side of the negotiation table, dealing with several publishers on actual and potential contracts, as well as overseeing budgets and executing business strategy.

Jeff joined Microsoft in 2002 to head up a group of developer liaisons working closely with game developers on the Xbox and Xbox 360 platforms to help improve the potential of their titles.  Jeff was the main spokesperson for Microsoft when talking with game developers about Xbox 360 plans and represented the Advanced Technology Group on the third-party portfolio management team for the platform.  Jeff has a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering and was a film student, a researcher, systems engineer, and project manager before entering game development.

Mark Terrano, Founder and Design Director

Mark was a lead designer, designer, and programmer on titles in the Age of Empires franchise and held the lead designer position on the best-selling strategy game of all-time: Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings.  The titles Mark contributed to have sold over 17 million copies worldwide.  Mark has lent his expertise towards aiding other game developers working on Xbox through his role as a Technical Game Manager for the Xbox organization and supporting game developers around the world.

Michael is one of the few experts in the world on the Xbox 360 CPU architecture and has 9 years of games and platform development experience, during which he's had the opportunity of working on nearly every major subsystem from graphics to animation to collision, with a focus on architecture and low-level optimization.  Michael has worked on several successful console titles including Xbox Live and Amped: Snowboarding, as well as being an instrumental part of the Xbox 360 launch team.

As part of Xbox's Advanced Technology Group, Michael has worked with dozens of game studios across ten different countries and consulted on numerous top selling games including many of the Xbox 360 launch titles such as Call of Duty 2, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and Project Gotham Racing along with Xbox titles such as Prince of Persia, Counterstrike, and Spiderman 2.  Michael also has a strong technical innovation background, and has invented many new algorithms and approaches for content generation, computer vision, audio processing, and text analysis.

Jim has eighteen years of progressive financial and executive managerial experience, the last eight of which have been in the interactive entertainment industry. Jim is currently president of Virtual World Entertainment, LLC (VWE). In 1999, Jim organized and led the buyout of this entity. Since the transaction, Jim has returned distributions to members of more than forty times their original investment through successful implementation of a harvesting strategy to maximize return from assets purchased.

Prior to that, Jim was CFO of VWE’s former parent company, Virtual World Entertainment Group, Inc. (VWEG), where he was instrumental to the negotiation and consummation of $30 million cash-for-stock sale of this entity, which included FASA Interactive. At VWEG, Jim was responsible for all aspects of finance, legal, risk management, human resources and information technology of this multi-company organization. Jim began his career in Chicago at Arthur Andersen LLP where he spent seven years and specialized in acquisition diligence for financial and strategic buyers in purchase transactions ranging from $5 to $500 million.