Seamus Blackley
 |
A May 2005 picture of Seamus Blackley, at his desk at CAA. |
Seamus Blackley is an agent with
Creative Artists Agency representing video game creators.
After entering
Tufts University to study
jazz piano, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis. As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the
Journal of Magnetic Resonance. After college, he studied
High Energy Physics at the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, until the
Superconducting Supercollider project was cancelled in
1993.
Blackley then went to work at Blue Sky Productions, later called
Looking Glass Studios. In addition to work there on
Ultima Underworld and
System Shock, Blackley helped to create the sophisticated physics system in
Flight Unlimited. He is mentioned in the
Flight Unlimited manual as follows::As far back as
1992, we started looking for new ways to fly on the
PC. Seamus Blackley, a physics expert and experienced pilot, had just been hired on at Looking Glass Technologies, and he was well placed to see where the current simulators fell short of what they could be.
He was no longer working with the company when
Flight Unlimited II was being developed. As a result, the second and third games did not have quite as sophisticated physics (though still arguably better than other games of the time), and the series became more civilian in nature.
After Looking Glass, Blackley worked at
Dreamworks Interactive as executive producer of
Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a physics-rich game published in
1998.
In
February 1999, Blackley joined
Microsoft. Originally hired to work on
DirectX, he co-wrote the initial
Xbox proposal, and helped assemble the team that designed and built the device. He then evangelized the Xbox to game developers around the world.
Blackley left Microsoft to co-found Capital Entertainment Group with former Microsoft co-worker
Kevin Bachus after his time developing the Xbox. CEG aimed to reform the financing models available in the game industry, following the Hollywood studio model, to provide more flexibility and creative control to game makers, and loosen the grip publishers had on control of the game industry. CEG was unable to complete a game before folding in 2004.
Currently, Blackley represents video game developers at the
Creative Artists Agency, evolving the position of video games within the entertainment industry.
*
Seamus Blackley's game credits on MobyGames*
Seamus Blackley Speech at DICE '03*
2003 CEG Interview*
2001 Xbox-related Interview*
1999 Gamasutra Post-Mortem on Trespasser*
Association for Computing Machinery Video Interview with Seamus Blackley
