Executive Producer · Games & Interactive
Producer and studio leader with 25 years at the intersection of storytelling and operations. The organizational translator between disciplines that often talk past each other, in environments where ambition is high, stakes are real, and great products are only forged when disparate teams see each other.
Keep reading
The work
Co-founded Blindlight to help Hollywood and the game industry communicate and collaborate — two industries that spoke completely different languages. Casting, voice production, motion capture, and marketing assets for 100+ titles including Halo 2 & 3, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Fable, and Rise to Honor with Jet Li, who performed his own motion capture and voice work.
"His DNA is still in the place. A passionate focus on interactive media and a dogged pursuit of excellent team results." Bo Crutcher, Studio Head — Blindlight
Rebuilt the Story organization inside one of the industry's most complicated creative machines, bridging narrative ambition and production reality across the Destiny franchise: The Dark Below, House of Wolves, and The Taken King. Metacritic went from 63 to 86 across four releases.
Translated premium storytelling into interactive experiences at one of the world's most protective IP owners. Led a team of 12 on Westworld: A Delos Destination — a project that went on to win an Emmy.
Assembled a team from three unshipped projects and shipped in 9 months on a ~$6M budget. Taught me exactly which corners you can cut and which ones you can't afford to cut again. The budget is never the problem. The scope decision is.
"Shipping any game is a miracle. Shipping one in a year is something else entirely." Billy Krolick, Lead Narrative Designer — Ire: A Prologue
Built the operational and leadership structures required for multiple studios to scale ambitious AAA development. Grew from a single founding studio to 500+ people and $250M+ in funding — reported at the time as the largest single raise in video gaming history.
How I lead
Chaos is only manageable when everyone is aligned toward the same goal. The first job is making sure that goal is clear enough to be a razor: something anyone on the team, regardless of role, can use to guide their decisions without asking.
Clarity is the most important leadership act. There will always be uncertainty, but it shouldn't land on the team. My job is to sit between the chaos and the people doing the work and make sure the team gets direction, not noise.
Studios that avoid building trust struggle to make great games. I build environments where adults tell each other the truth, conflict gets surfaced and addressed, and nobody has to guess what's actually going on.
"He pairs a sharp grasp of the business with genuine respect for the creative work, which makes him an empathetic and effective manager. Even when hard calls have to be made, he explains them straight, sets the direction, and trusts his team to get there." Ben Mullins, Principal Technical Artist — ProbablyMonsters
You can't separate a team's ability to deliver from how that team feels about showing up. I've seen teams sustain output from a place of fear and exhaustion, but never without a heavy toll. Talent is the heart of any creative endeavor. Assembling it is hard. Keeping it is harder.
The best production leadership is invisible when it works. The team isn't thinking about the chaos, the friction, or what's still unresolved. It got absorbed, addressed, and converted into direction. And the team gets to build something great.
How I run production
The scope decision is the most important production call, and the one most likely to get deferred. Budget overruns, missed deadlines, post-launch regrets: trace most of them backwards and you'll find a scope decision that was made late, made vaguely, or not made at all. Getting there first is most of the job.
Production clarity and creative clarity have to move together. A team can't execute well against a fuzzy creative brief. And a crisp plan can't survive a team that doesn't know what they're actually building. On every project I've run (from the $250M builds at ProbablyMonsters to shipping Ire: A Prologue in nine months on a $6M budget), what went right traces to the same place: the team knew exactly what success looked like before we started executing.
Metacritic went from 63 to 86 across four Destiny releases at Bungie. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because we narrowed the promise of what each release was, then delivered against it completely. The ambition didn't change. The definition of done got sharper.
The thing I keep relearning: the teams that ship great work almost always made their hard decisions earlier than the teams that didn't. Scope, story, structure — whatever the core call is, delaying it doesn't make it easier. It just makes it more expensive.
What I believe
Before any of this is a games problem, it's a story problem.
Every large-scale human coordination mechanism (culture, law, money, religion) runs on shared narrative. Story is how humans build models of reality. How belief gets created. How one generation hands the world to the next. The question every entertainment medium is trying to answer is the same: how do you get someone inside the story? Film brought images. Television brought consistency. Games brought agency. The direction has always been the same: more of the audience inside the experience, more of the experience inside the audience.
Story does something no other format can. It lets someone emotionally experience a truth before they intellectually evaluate it. That's why an idea expressed through story is the most significant thing you can place inside another person's mind. The stories people tell themselves determine what they attempt. The stories cultures tell determine what they build.
Your brain is a story engine. It converts raw experience into meaning, constantly, whether you ask it to or not. That's the mechanism every storyteller has ever tapped into: novels, film, theater. You fill in what's not on the page. The story engine does the work.
Games promised something different: not just a story to receive, but one to participate in. "As a player, to be an active participant in the story being told." That was the promise. Forty years on, it's still open.
There are two problems on the path to cashing it. The first is awareness: games that track what you actually do, understand what it meant, and produce meaningfully different outcomes. Players have been asking for persistence more than branching all along. The second is shared agency: characters that hold their own will inside the same space as the player. Nobody has built that yet.
For the first time in forty years, I think both are actually solvable.
The games I'm actively working on right now treat runtime as a discipline. Under three hours. Story-first. Built around a specific question: what does it feel like to actually be inside a narrative, not just moving through one?
A different model
The games industry has been solving the wrong problem.
When production costs spiral, the instinct is to add team, extend timeline, expand scope — throw more at it until it breaks differently. The result is studios spending $200M to ship something that should have cost $40M, then wondering why the math doesn't work. The answer most reach for is: do it bigger. That's the wrong direction.
The audience has already moved. The person who played games in their twenties and doesn't anymore — not because they stopped caring, but because games stopped fitting their life — represents the largest untapped market in entertainment. They're not asking for more. They want less, better. A game that respects their time and earns its ending.
The economics of a story-first title with a constrained production cycle work in ways that AAA math never can. A lean team. A focused scope. Co-dev infrastructure that compresses cost without compressing craft. A player who pays $30 for something that delivers what no 80-hour open world ever did: the feeling that it was made specifically for them.
AI changes the arithmetic further. Content pipelines that would have taken months can be accelerated without sacrificing quality. Systems that would have required specialist teams can be built with smaller ones. The question is whether studios use that efficiency to chase bigger and more expensive, or to ship better and faster.
The work I'm building now bets on the latter.
In Development
Some of what I'm building isn't ready to be public. What's here is far enough along to share selectively — a look at where the work is heading. If you'd like access, reach out.
Interactive Narrative · Liminal Production
Early development · Story-first · Under three hours
The player is a specific person, in a specific moment, making a decision they don't yet understand the weight of. By the end — under three hours — they do.
Built around the question the Thinking section sets up: what does it feel like to actually be inside a narrative, not just moving through one? The answer requires the game to respond to what the player actually does, not just what they choose from a menu.
Systemic storytelling. Constrained scope. $5–10M range. AI-accelerated content pipeline. Production model designed to feel like a $30M title built for a fraction of that.
Full brief, prototype plan, and business thesis available on request.
Let's talk
New studios. Ambitious products. Organizations trying to do something that hasn't been done before. That's the challenge I keep coming back to. It's where I've done my best work. And it's what I'm looking for next.