Management
Gary Gattis, President/ Executive Producer, wrote his first game on an Apple II+ in 1984. Gary graduated with a Fine Arts/ Computer Science degree from the University of Texas in 1990. Not long afterwards, he got his vocational start in gaming when he co-founded Human Code. He stayed with Human Code as it grew to over 300 people. Gary then went to work for Digital Anvil as Director of Development. In 2000, he left the gaming industry for three years and went to work for Bowstreet, directing large-scale enterprise software installations for Fortune 100 companies. In 2003 he joined SOE as a Senior Producer, guiding SWG’s live development. He and his partners (Anthony Sommers, Cinco Barnes, and Jake Rodgers) founded Spacetime Studios in October 2005.
Anthony L. Sommers, Vice President/ Technical Director, has been a professional game developer for over 10 years, starting his career at Origin Systems in 1994. Since then, he has shipped 7 titles, including several in the award-winning Wing Commander series. Anthony spent the last 5 years at SOE as a Lead Programmer working on the million-selling MMO, “Star Wars Galaxies : An Empire Divided” and its first expansion, “Jump to Lightspeed”, seeing both projects through development, launch, and live. Through SOE, he has several patents pending for Star Wars Galaxies’ procedural terrain system, where landscapes are generated on the fly and in real-time, and was invited to be among the first developers to receive Playstation 3 development kits.
Cinco Barnes, Vice President/ Creative Director, began developing games for the Apple II PC in the early 1980’s. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994 and began his career in videogames at Origin Systems with “Wing Commander: Prophecy.” He was next asked to lead the design of its sequel “Wing Commander: Secret Ops.” Cinco went to work on 3DO company’s “Might and Magic” franchise, before being invited to join Sony Online Entertainment. He served as Lead Designer of “Star Wars Galaxies” and its two sequels (“Jump to Lightspeed” and “Rage of the Wookiees”), which have combined sales of over a million units.
Jake Rodgers, Vice President/ Art Director, has shipped over a dozen titles, spanning fourteen years of art directing games for Sony Online Entertainment, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts.. He was responsible for the look of “Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided”, and its expansions “Jump to Lightspeed” and “Rage of the Wookiees”. After starting out on such classic titles as the “Wing Commander”, “Ultima”, and “Privateer” series, his focus is on massively multiplayer games, and anywhere art and technology come together. He was also invited to be a keynote speaker at the 3D Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark
David Levy: Visual Director, has been working in the game industry for the last twelve years as a concept artist and art director. He comes to the company from Ubisoft, where he served as senior concept artist and illustrator for multiple projects. His background includes a stint at Reel FX where his clients included Hasbro, Disney Channel and Blue Sky Studios. He also worked extensively at Acclaim where he was the lead artist on the highly successful Turok Evolution game. He is frequently a speaker at various conferences and has produced highly successful tutorials on his techniques. After working all over the world on various projects, he joined Spacetime as their Visual Director.
Ron Kerwin, Director of Finance and Operations, graduated with an accounting degree from the University of Texas in 1989. Ron got his start in the gaming industry in 1991 with Origin Systems, working his way up to Finance Manager before leaving in 1996 to work as a consultant on accounting and finance functionalities for business software giant SAP AG until 2003. Ron returned to his roots in gaming in 2005 when he joined Spacetime Studios as Director of Finance and Operations.
Jeremy Siprelle, Director of IT, avid Sailor and Computer Geek, has been working in the IT industry for the past 12 years. In 2001 Jeremy left the stuffy corporate world to take a position running IT Operations for Sony Online Entertainment: Austin. After 6 years with SOE, Jeremy accepted an opportunity to build an IT infrastructure from the ground up at Spacetime Studios.
Audrey Franklin, Director of Facilities and Administration, has been in Business/Facilities Administration for over 17 years working in various agencies such as GTECH, TWCC, Northrop Grumman and SOE Austin. She left SOE to spend two years working at MTV Networks in NYC before coming back home to Austin to help Spacetime Studios build their company.
Dave Timoney, Project Manager, has worked on over 22 titles while at Humongous Entertainment, Amaze Entertainment and Gas Powered Games. Having been a programmer, sound designer and producer, he is now a Project Manager at Spacetime.
Design
Brandon Reinhart, Lead Designer, has worked in games development since 1998. At Epic Games he developed gameplay for Unreal and Unreal Tournament as well as many Unreal engine features. At 3D Realms he served as a core gameplay programmer on Duke Nukem Forever. At Sony Online Entertainment he switched from programming to game design and became a technical systems designer on Star Wars Galaxies and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion. As the Lead Designer at Spacetime Studios, Brandon develops game IP, helps set the team’s game design philosophy, and leads the day to day efforts of the design team in content and gameplay systems.
Sara Jensen Schubert, Senior Designer, was a key designer on the Shadowbane live team at Wolfpack Studios. Sara is often asked to speak at various conferences about her expertise in metrics analysis. Prior to entering the game industry, she was worked as a web developer and studied English at Reed College.
Reece Thornton, Senior Designer, has been working on computer games since 1994, when he began his employment with Origin Systems. Twelve years and many types of games and tools later, he’s using a holistic view of game design to give enjoyment to players while satisfying clients from both within and without the core development team. Reece has been involved with the production of numerous titles for Origin Systems, Inc., Electronic Arts, Jane’s Combat Simulations, and Sony Online Entertainment.
Jeff Freeman, Senior Designer, has a game design history that includes tabletop RPGs, BBS door games, text MUDs and online-RPGs. He worked at SOE for six years before joining the team at Spacetime Studios.
Jason Durall, Senior Content Designer, graduated from Whitworth College in 1989 with a degree in English. He taught overseas in Japan for six years, and went from being a web developer and freelance pen-and-paper RPG designer to a fulltime MMO developer. He’s worked on MMOs for companies like Wolfpack, Ubisoft, Perpetual, and now Spacetime Studios.
Concept
Thom Tenery, Senior Concept Artist, received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Texas, Arlington, and studied illustration and entertainment design at Art Center College of Design. Seven years of experience in architecture and interiors, and a passion for art, film and science fiction, led him to a career in entertainment design. He worked as a freelance concept designer and visual development artist on a wide range of entertainment projects in Los Angeles before joining the team at Spacetime Studios.
Joe Watmough, Concept Artist, has been a professional tattoo artist for 14 years. After several years concentrating on painting from life, he brought his unique backround of experience to the Spacetime concept art team.
Justin Oaksford, Concept Art Intern, pushed himself and his art through his high school years, graduating a year early. Not eager to return to school the following Autumn and driven by his thirst to better his art, Justin focused on getting a head-start on the competition by taking his first step into the industry assisting our Concept Team, moving away from his home-base in Florida. He hopes to attend art school in Fall 2008.
Art
Jason Decker, Lead Worldbuilding Artist, received his degree in CS degree at UT. His first job was to develop modeling and animation software for courtroom accident reconstruction videos. As exciting as that was, he felt creating art for games was the place to be and went on to work at The Logic Factory, Digital Anvil, and Microsoft before joining Spacetime Studios.
Chris Douglas, Lead Hardware Artist, graduated from the University of Texas in 1991 with a Bachelor’s degree in Art. He soon found himself at Origin Systems, where he spent the next six years working primarily on the Wing Commander line. Since then he has worked at Microprose, Kinesoft, and Sony Online Entertainment.
Eric Miller, Sr. Environment Artist, was creating art and playing far too many games at an early age. After completing two degrees, BFA in Illustration and Associate of Science in Computer Animation, and a career shift he got his start in the game industry in early 2004 at Ironlore Entertainment. As an artist at Ironlore he shipped both Titan Quest and TQ: Immortal Throne for the PC. In early 2007 he joined Spacetime Studios.
Raymond Arriaga, Sr. Environment Artist, started his career in games after graduating from the Art Institute of Dallas in 1995. He is credited on 10 published titles. He has an extensive background in console development while environments are his focus. After a comfortable and well liked extended stay at Paradigm Entertainment for 10 years, he moved to LA for 2 years for a great experience and chance to work on developing Sony, Santa Monica’s God of War2. He and his family are excited and happy to be back in Texas and have found a new home at Spacetime Studios.
Ray Peña, Animator, studied fine art and animation in college. He moved to Austin to work for Acclaim Studios and has since worked in film and television as well as games. His focus these days is spending every free moment with his daughter, Zoë and taking orders from Nein Nunb.
Nathan Beckwith, Senior Character Artist, clawed his way up from the QA dept. at Acclaim entertainment. After finding his niche in character art during the development of The Red Star, he moved into a wonderful freelance career where he avoided traffic and daylight for years. However the call of Spacetime was too great and he was lured into the sunlight once again.
Michael Tarwater, Senior Character Artist, got his start in games as a concept artist at Ritual Entertainment, at the age of 21, while attending The Art Institute of Dallas. A year and a half later he decided he wanted to be involved in the 3D side of game art, and joined the Iron Lore Entertainment art staff as a character artist. After 3 years, he returned to his Texas roots by joining Spacetime Studios.
Ranjeet Singhal, Technical Artist, began dreaming of video games with the introduction of home PC’s in the late 70’s. Singhal began on Atari 8-bit machines, then to Amiga 16 bit platforms and then to PC’s with the advent of VGA cards. With over a dozen shipped titles to his credit, Ranjeet Singhal has worked with some of the most respected houses in the industry including Eidos/Crystal Dynamics, Activision/iD, Valve Software, Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft/Red Storm.
Tech
Rick Delashmit, Lead Programmer, started programming back on the Apple 2 while getting into writing bbs systems and multiline bbs games. Eventually he moved on to MUDs and pc games before going to Origin to work on Ultima Online. After UO, he and a few like-minded individuals formed Wombat Games, where he worked on an original MMO while contracting on various other projects (UO:T2A, Klingon Academy, 10six, Ryzom). From there, Rick moved on to Wizards of the Coast for a D&D online game, then to SOE for SWG and multiple expansions.
Robert Marsa, Lead Programmer, was co-founder and CTO of Wolfpack Studios, where he developed, launched, and supported the MMO Shadowbane. After leaving Wolfpack he consulted for several publishers on MMO projects before joining Fastlane Games as Lead Server Engineer on an unannounced MMO title. Robert earned a Ph.D. in Physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1995. He has co-authored more than a dozen publications and has recently presented at AGC and Apple’s WWDC. Robert has more than 16 years of professional software development experience which includes embedded hardware, drivers, compilers, database applications, image processing, signal processing, large-scale scientific computing, as well as massively-multiplayer games. He is now Lead Programmer for Spacetime Studios.
Tobias Ford, Senior Programmer, is a graduate from the University of Missouri at Columbia with a degree in Computer Science. Prior to obtaining his degree he had a brief stint as a indie comic book artist. Upon graduation, he began a 4 year stint with Wolfpack Studios where he worked on Shadowbane. He later moved on to SOE, where he became part of the team bringing about SWG: Jump to Light Speed. He’s been with Spacetime Studios almost as long as there have been offices. Occasionally, he still designs and illustrates fliers for local Austin bands and events.
Eric Sebesta, Senior Programmer, has been making games since 1997, but has been passionate about them for far longer. Eric began his game development career with an internship at Origin Systems while attending the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, he has worked on numerous massively multiplayer games including the high-profile Star Wars Galaxies and its first three expansion packs, which were developed by Sony Online Entertainment. Eric holds bachelor degrees in Computer Science and English from the University of Texas.
Waylon Calabrese, Programmer, has been in the game development industry for over nine years. Waylon is a gamer and programmer but also enjoys the Austin music scene, playing soccer in the park, and hiking the Texas Hill Country. He lives in South Austin with his wife Jami and their two dogs, Ellie and The Pig, in a house that they are perpetually remodeling.
Read Bixby, Programmer, is relatively new to the MMO playing field, having found engineering software and web based applications to be unfulfilling. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003 with a degree in computer science.
Mark Bennett, Programmer, graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Mathematics in 2002. He created video slot machine games for Multimedia Games, Inc. before joining Spacetime Studios.