Classic Gaming Expo™ Distinguished Guests and Speakers

The following is an informal list of videogaming "alumni" who you will have the opportunity to hear in a keynote, panel, or perhaps bump into while shopping or perusing the museum!

*** NOTE: Classic video game alumni who would like to attend Classic Gaming Expo™ as a distinguished guest (and perhaps even give a keynote speech) are encouraged to CONTACT US. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

This page is up-to-date as of August 04, 2012

MR. STEVE CARTWRIGHT
Biography
Activision designer responsible for the Atari VCS games Megamania, Barnstorming, Plaque Attack, Frostbite and Seaquest. His post-Activision career is equally prolific with his involvement with the NBA Live and PGA Tour franchises for EA and popular cross-platform games like Deer Hunter, Zuma, and Diner Dash.

MR. JIM CHARNE
Biography
Jim worked at the original Activision with Garry and Dan Kitchen as east coast creative development manager and had responsibility for managing the game studios in Glen Rock, NJ and Boston. Those studios gave birth to Keystone Kapers, Crackpots, H.E.R.O., Pressure Cooker, Designer's Pencil, Garry Kitchen's Game Maker, Fireworks Design Kit, and various wrestling and racing games.

MR. DAVID CRANE
Biography
Co-founder of Activision in 1979, where he designed such classics as Pitfall!, Dragster, Decathlon, Fishing Derby, Freeway and Ghostbusters. He transcended the Atari era with memorable titles such as A Boy and His Blob for NES and David Crane's Amazing Tennis for 16-bit systems. In 2012, David Crane will announce a new game project at Classic Gaming Expo. For details, click here.

MR. TED DABNEY
(via Skype) The original Atari, Inc. was co-founded in 1972 by Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell. In 1971, they created an engineering firm, Syzygy Engineering, that designed and built the first arcade video game, Computer Space for Nutting Associates.

MR. WARREN DAVIS
Biography
Best known for the arcade hit Q*Bert while at Gottlieb, Warren was also responsible for Joust 2 and Us vs. Them.

MR. WALTER DAY
Walter is best known to the videogame community as founder and one-time owner of "Twin Galaxies", the official record-keeping branch of the gaming community.

MR. DAVID FOX
Biography
David Fox is a multimedia producer, best known for his early work on LucasArts games such as Rescue on Fractalus, Labyrinth, and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

MR. BRAD FREGGER
Biography
The first computer games producer at Activision (possibly the world, for that matter) and the producer for games designed by David Crane, Alan Miller, and Steve Cartwright. Additionally, he was the producer who discovered Shanghai, is directly involved in the history of Tetris, and is the inventor of Computer Card Solitaire.

MR. ED FRIES
Biography
Ed Fries created his first video games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s. He joined Microsoft in 1986, and spent the next ten years as one of the early developers on Excel and Word. He left the Office team to pursue his passion for interactive entertainment and created Microsoft Game Studios. Over the next eight years he grew the team from 50 people to over 1200, published more than 100 games including more than a dozen million+ sellers, co-founded the Xbox project, and made Microsoft one of the leaders in the interactive entertainment business.

MR. STEVE GOLSON
Biography
Steve Golson designed the hardware for General Computer's first product, Super Missile Attack, an enhancement kit for the Atari arcade game Missile Command. He also designed the hardware for their second product, an enhancement kit for Pac-Man which eventually became the arcade game Ms. Pac-Man, the biggest selling arcade game in US history.

MR. KEITHEN HAYENGA
Biography
Atari 5200 game designer best known for incorporating speech in RealSports Baseball at a time when most home games required a separate voice synthesizer add-on.

MR. ROGER HECTOR
Biography
Has created and produced over 100 games since 1976 in Coin op, Consoles, PCs, and Mobile. Project credits include: Warlords, Battlezone, John Madden Football, the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and recently Pac-Man and Enslaved among others. He has lead R&D at Atari, and lead game development at EA, Disney, Universal Studios, and Namco Bandai.

MS. REBECCA HEINEMAN
Multi-faceted game designer best known for The Bard's Tale III, Mindshadow, Borrowed Time, Battle Chess, The Tracer Sanction and Tass Times in Tonetown. She also ported Another World to Mac, SNES and Apple IIGS.

MS. JENNELL JAQUAYS
Jennell is a video and boardgame designer best known for Dungeons & Dragons modules Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia for Judges Guild; development and design of conversions on games such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong for Coleco's home arcade video game system; and more recent design work for various video games, including the Age of Empires series, Quake 2, and Quake III Arena.

MR. ARNIE KATZ
Biography
Co-founder of Electronic Games Magazine, the first and most popular publication devoted strictly to electronic entertainment.

MR. DAN KITCHEN
Biography
Co-founder of Absolute Software and designer of Atari classics Crackpots, Double Dragon, Ghostbusters, and Kung-Fu Master.

MR. GARRY KITCHEN
Biography
Creator of Space Jockey, Keystone Kapers and Pressure Cooker for the Atari 2600. For the Commodore 64 computer, he wrote The Designer's Pencil and Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker.

MR. FRANZ LANZINGER
Biography
Franz worked as a programmer and game designer at Atari Games Inc. and Tengen. He designed the ground-breaking arcade hit, Crystal Castles, founded Bitmasters in 1990, and designed Sega Genesis games Ms. Pac-Man, Championship Pool, and NCAA Final Four.

MR. MICHAEL MEYERS
Biography
Michael has over 30 years of experience promoting and marketing games and gaming related businesses. He is the former senior editor of GamePro Magazine. He has also run the PR departments of major gaming publishers Acclaim Entertainment (96-99) and the 3DO Company (99-02).

MR. BOB NEWSTADT
One of Intellivision's Blue Sky Rangers, Bob co-designed the Intellivision hit Pinball.

MS. KAREN NUGENT
Biography
A talented artist who designed the graphics for BurgerTime, Super Pro Football, Mission X, Scooby Doo's Maze Chase and Flintstone's Keyboard Fun. She also worked with Disney on animated feature films.

MR. PETER OLIPHANT
Peter is best known for his work at Disney Interactive (Stonekeep), Interplay (Rocket Ranger, Lexi-Cross) and Cinemaware (Sinbad and The Throne of The Falcon, TV Sports: Football) and also designed Sierra On-Line's Mr. Cool and Troll's Tale.

MR. CHRISTOPHER "NIK" OMARZU
Chris Omarzu created 2600 carts Pepsi Invaders (aka Coke Wins) and prototype Good Luck, Charlie Brown, and co-created Big Bird's Egg Catch and Oscar's Trash Race, all for Atari. Programmed a pingame (Pharaoh) at Williams, PC game ports (Mech Brigade, President Elect '88) at SSI, and graphics kernels for Aegis Animator and SSI's Pool of Radiance. Late 1980's architect and programmer of pre-WWW browsers and search engines (Health Reference Center, InfoTrac ES). More recently, he co-authored several books on XML in both the Professional XML and Beginning XML series for Wrox Press.

MR. ROGER PEDERSEN
Roger E. Pedersen has been designing, producing, and programming games since the early 1980's with cumulative sales surpassing 60 million copies on over 80 titles for multiple platforms including PC, console, location-based, internet, arcade, and handheld systems. He is also the author of award-winning articles for Gamasutra.com, GameDev.net and Gignews.com and the best-selling Wordware Publishing book entitled Game Design Foundations.

MR. HOWARD PHILLIPS
The original “Gamemaster”, Howard has been designing and producing games for over 30 years (167 and counting!). Howard began his career at Nintendo, rising in the ranks to become Nintendo’s official Gamemaster and Creative Director. Since then he has been Studio Manager, VP Development, and Creative Director for industry giants such as Nintendo, Lucasfilm Games, Microsoft, and Epic. Howard’s most recent title Infinity Blade was winner of the 2011 Apple Design Award, and more than 20 “Game of the Year” & “Top App” awards.

MR. DAVID POKORNY
David worked at Westwood Studios and Parker Brothers. His most popular credits are his production of Dune for the Sega Genesis and Monopoly for PC CD-ROM.

MR. BOB POLARO
Biography
Responsible for the Atari computer hit Lemonade Stand as well as such 2600 classics as Defender, RealSports Volleyball, Desert Falcon, Road Runner, Rampage and Sprintmaster.

MR. WARREN ROBINETT
Biography
Designer of the legendary Atari 2600 videogame Adventure, the first graphical adventure game and the first game ever to contain an "Easter Egg". He is a co-founder of The Learning Company and designed the classic educational title Rocky's Boots, which won "Software of the Year" from three magazines in 1983.

MR. KEITH ROBINSON
Biography
Intellivision programmer and manager at Mattel Electronics, designer of Tron Solar Sailer and producer of a number of other Intellivision games. Co-founder of Intellivision Productions, Inc., which has released collections of the classic games for many modern systems, including PC, Xbox, Nintendo DS and iPhone. Products and Intellivision history can be found at www.intellivisionlives.com.

MR. JOHN SEGHERS
The man who brought us some of the most unique Atari 5200 games ever, he designed Gremlins, Countermeasure, and RealSports Soccer as well as Xari Arena (which was never commercially released but the prototype dump is often cited among favorites among 5200 fans). While at Atari he developed a number of tools including a four-voice touchpad-controlled music editor. He is also credited as a programmer on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the NES.

MR. ROBERT SMITH
Biography
Created Video Pinball while at Atari and Star Voyager, Riddle of the Sphinx, Dragonfire, and Moonsweeper for the Atari 2600 while at Imagic. Also programmed Star Wars: The Arcade Game (2600) for Parker Brothers.

MR. JOHN P. SOHL
 John worked at Mattel for two years, from October 1980 to October 1982. During that time, he designed Astrosmash and (with some assistance) B-17 Bomber. After Mattel, John was recruited by Activision where he spent most of his time working on a game called Termite for the Intellivision and C-64 which was never completed or released.

MR. RICHARD SPITALNY
Founder of First Star Software.

MR. TOMMY TALLARICO
Tommy has been writing music for video games for more than 22 years and is one of the most successful video game composers in history. His top titles include Earthworm Jim, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Disney’s Aladdin, Spider-Man, Metroid Prime as well as popular game franchises such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, Madden Football, Mortal Kombat, Time Crisis, Unreal, Lineage, James Bond, Blitz Football, Knockout Kings, Test Drive, Scooby Doo, WWE & Twisted Metal. He has won over 50 industry awards and holds the Guinness World Record for the person who has worked on the most video games in the world. Tommy is creator and host of the critically acclaimed world touring symphonic music show Video Games Live. He is also the founder and CEO of the non-profit organization Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), and was co-creator and host for over 12 years of the Telly award winning television series the Electric Playground and Reviews on the Run/Judgment Day.

MR. DAVID THIEL
Biography
Best known for his audio work, David did the voices for Q*bert. He has worked on a number of other games with memorable sound and music including Reactor, Mad Planets, Mach 3, Guardian & Insector as well as numerous pinball machines. You can find more details about his projects at his website, http://daudioguy.multiply.com/video.

MR. ELI TOMLINSON
Eli Tomlinson is the founder of Microdaft. Microdaft published Dropzone & Solar Star for Atari 8-bit computers. He is the author of Chipmunk, one of the most popular software duplication programs for the Atari 8-bit. Chipmunk had a menu where the user selected the game they wanted from a list of titles that Eli personally cracked.

MR. DAVE WARHOL
Biography
Designed and programmed Mind Strike for the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System and programmed the Intellivision game Thunder Castle.  As founder and president of Realtime Associates, he produced and co-designed over 25 original Intellivision releases for INTV Corporation. In addition to providing sound effects and music to over two dozen Intellivision games, Mr. Warhol also wrote drivers, music, and sound effects for many C64, Atari 400/800, Apple II, Amiga, and early PC games.

MR. STEVE WOITA
Biography
Designer of Atari 2600 classics Quadrun, Taz, and Asterix, Tengen's Super Sprint for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sonic 2, Kid Chameleon and Sonic Spinball for the Sega Genesis.

MS. JOYCE WORLEY
Biography
Co-founder of Electronic Games Magazine, and concurrently published Electronic Games Hotline, a bi-weekly newsletter which covered the latest news surrounding the hobby.

MR. STEVE WRIGHT

Biography

Manager of the home videogame division of Atari, programmed "Pele's Soccer" for the VCS.  Joined up with SEGA in 1983 to produce Laser Disk games, which ultimately landed him in the Computer Animation field working in Hollywood.
 

CONTEMPORARY GUESTS & MODERATORS

MR. BRETT WEISS
Brett is the author of three books: Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984 (McFarland, 2007), Classic Home Video Games, 1985-1988 (McFarland, 2009) and Classic Home Video Games, 1989-1990 (McFarland, 2011). In addition, Brett's had articles published in Game Informer, Classic Gamer Magazine, Toy Shop, Video Game Collector, Video Game Trader, the Comics Buyer's Guide, Fangoria, AntiqueWeek, and various other publications.

More special guests, speakers and moderators will be announced here as the show grows near. Please check back here or join our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter to get this information as soon as it's available!

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