Michael Verdu (born December 28, 1964) is an American manager and producer and author of computer games.

Life

Verdu was born on December 28, 1964. His father worked for a trade union, his mother was a dance instructor. Michael visited the

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (; RPI) is a private university, private research university in Troy, New York, United States. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was establishe ...

Troy Troy (/; ; ) or Ilion (; ) was an ancient city located in present-day Hisarlik, Turkey. It is best known as the setting for the Greek mythology, Greek myth of the Trojan War. The archaeological site is open to the public as a tourist destina ...

, 600 km away from his native Washington. He did not finish his studies because Advanced Technology, an IT service provider for the US

Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD, or DOD) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government charged with coordinating and supervising the six U.S. armed services: the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Space Force, ...

, offered him a lucrative job as a programmer. Aged 20, he left Advanced Technology in 1985 to found the software company Paragon Systems that produced software for the Department of Defense. Paragon's programs were used to maintain submarines of the

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

and

Los Angeles-class submarine The ''Los Angeles'' class of submarines are nuclear-powered fast attack submarines ( SSN) in service with the United States Navy. Also known as the 688 class (pronounced "six-eighty-eight") after the hull number of lead vessel , 62 were built ...

s. The company also rented out programming capacities, for example to

Bob Bates Robert Bates (born December 11, 1953) is an American video game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After ...

' video game start-up Challenge Inc. which developed

text adventure Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...

s for industry leader

Infocom Infocom, Inc., was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerston ...

. In September 1987 Verdu sold Paragon Systems (which had 25 employees by the time) to IT service provider American Systems Corporation where he worked as the business unit director for software development for the following three years. When defense budgets dwindled down with the end of the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

, Verdu turned his passion for computer games into a profession and founded the video game development studio Legend Entertainment together with Bob Bates who in the meantime was affected by the shutdown of Infocom. Legend Entertainment produced text adventures and acted as its own

publisher Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

. Verdu was the CEO of the company and remained on this position until the company was sold to

GT Interactive Atari, Inc. is an American video gaming company based in New York City, and a subsidiary of the Atari SA holding company. It is the main entity serving the commercial Atari brand globally since 2003. The company currently publishes games based o ...

in 1998. After the acquisition Legend Entertainment was integrated into GT Interactive's production line as a studio and remained so when Infogrames bought GT in 1999. Verdu and Bates acted as the studio heads, with the studio focussing on the production of first person shooters. From July 2002 until May 2009 Verdu worked for

EA Los Angeles Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. The company was founded in March 1995 as joint venture between DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft (later moved to Mi ...

, first as producer, then from 2005 on as division director for

real-time strategy Real-time strategy (RTS) is a Video game genre, subgenre of strategy video games that does not progress incrementally in turn-based game, turns, but allow all players to play simultaneously, in "real time." By contrast, in Turn-based strategy, tur ...

games, and from 2007 on as vice president/general manager. During his seven years at EA Los Angeles he was responsible for titles such as '' Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars'' or '' The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II''. From June 2009 until August 2012 Verdu worked as Chief Creative Officer for American

browser game A browser game is a video game that is played on the internet using a web browser. They are sometimes referred to more specifically by their format, such as Flash games or HTML5 games. They are generally free-to-play and can be either single-pl ...

publisher

Zynga Zynga Inc. () is an American video game developer and Video game publisher, publisher known for its social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile an ...

. At this time Zynga had a market value of about nine billion dollars. In September 2012 he left Zynga to found the independent

studio A studio is a space set aside for creative work of any kind, including art, dance, music and theater. The word ''studio'' is derived from the , from , from ''studere'', meaning to study or zeal. Types Art The studio of any artist, esp ...

TapZen. The starting capital was provided by his former employer, later on Chinese tech corporation

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. ( zh, s=腾讯, p=Téngxùn) is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology Conglomerate (company), conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimed ...

acquired a financial interest. In January 2015 TapZen was bought up by browser and mobile games producer

Kabam Kabam (formerly Watercooler, Inc.) is a Canadian video game developer and publisher founded in 2006 and headquartered in Vancouver, with offices in Montreal, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas. The company develops and publishes massively multipl ...

. The Canadians hired Verdu as Chief Creative Officer for the mother company. When Kabam was bought up by South Korean video game company Netmarble Verdu went back to

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

, this time as senior vice president of

EA Mobile EA Mobile Inc. is an American video game developer, video game development studio of the video game publisher, publisher Electronic Arts (EA) for mobile platforms. The studio's primary business is producing games for mobile phones. It has als ...

. From May 2019 on he was vice president of content for

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

and

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...

at the Oculus division of Facebook. In July 2021 he was hired by

Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...

as vice president, responsible for their upcoming video game branch. Verdu is married and lives in California.

Works

In games business, Verdu mainly laid the focus on being a manager and producer. During the ten years as CEO of Legend Entertainment he engaged in creative activities as well though. ''

Mission Critical A mission critical (also mission essential) factor of a system is any factor (component, equipment, personnel, process, procedure, software, etc.) that is essential to business, organizational, or governmental operations. Failure or disruption o ...

'' (1995) was the only narrative game he completely wrote himself. He was involved in writing the scripts for ''Gateway'' und ''Gateway II: Homeworld'' and the development of the ego shooter ''Unreal II: The Awakening''; his share of the work on ''Gateway II'' was about 50%. Verdu started the Legend Entertainment tradition to obtain licenses for literary works and use them as a blueprint for games. When the company faced the problem of having only two full-time authors (Bob Bates and Steve Meretzky) and thus having too little capacities for producing new games, Verdu suggested licensing existing stories to save time on game design. As a fan of the works of

Frederik Pohl Frederik George Pohl Jr. (; November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American list of science fiction authors, science-fiction writer, editor, and science fiction fandom, fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first ...

he brought up the idea of using Pohl's '' Gateway'' trilogy as a blueprint for a game. Bob Bates made use of his contacts back from Infocom times and organized the license. Verdu suggested himself as the author for the implementation. He had no previous experience in this metier, but Legend found a way to canalise Verdu's thirst for action: The writing of the script was shared between three unexperienced but enthusiastic authors (Verdu, programmer Glen Dahlgren and producer and musician Michael Lindner) who were supervised by Bates. This way of working worked well, ''Gateway'' was well received by the media. Other conventional writers whose works were licensed to Legend for conversions to computer games were

Piers Anthony Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob (born August 6, 1934) is an American author in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is best known for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xan ...

('' Companions of Xanth''),

Terry Brooks Terence Dean Brooks (born January 8, 1944) is an American writer of fantasy fiction. He writes mainly high fantasy, epic fantasy, and has also written two film novelizations. He has written 23 New York Times Best Seller List, ''New York Times'' ...

(''

Shannara ''Shannara'' is a series of high fantasy novels written by Terry Brooks, beginning with '' The Sword of Shannara'' in 1977 and concluding with ''The Last Druid'' which was released in October 2020; there is also a prequel, '' First King of Sha ...

'') and Spider Robinson ('' Callahan's Crosstime Saloon''). In ''Mission Critical'' Verdu delved into the topics of evolution and the potential of artificial intelligence. His central issue was how humanity could deal with the awakening of artificial intelligence as an actual new lifeform, not as an anthropomorphic reflection of humans as seen in literature. In this context Verdu sees the current stage of evolution as an intermediate form within the frame of a further evolution.

Reception

American ''

Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

'' magazine named ''Mission Critical'' game of the year 1995. During the "Year in Review 1995" awards hosted by US magazine Computer Game Review ''Mission Critical'' won in the categories "Adventure of the Year" and "Best Graphics of the Year".Nuke.com:

Games

* 1990: '' Spellcasting 101'' (producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1991: '' Timequest'' (co-producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1992: '' Frederik Pohl's Gateway'' (co-producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1993: '' Gateway II: Homeworld'' (co-producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1993: '' Eric the Unready'' (co-producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1994: '' Superhero League of Hoboken'' (co-producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1995: ''

'' (author, Legend Entertainment) * 1999: ''

The Wheel of Time ''The Wheel of Time'' is a series of high fantasy novels by the American author Robert Jordan, with American author Brandon Sanderson as co-writer of the final three installments. Originally planned as a trilogy, ''The Wheel of Time'' came to ...

'' (co-producer, Legend Entertainment) * 1999: '' Unreal Mission Pack 1: Return to Na Pali'' (producer, Legend Entertainment) * 2003: '' Unreal II: The Awakening'' (author, Legend Entertainment) * 2006: '' The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II'' (producer, EA Los Angeles) * 2007: '' Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars'' (producer, EA Los Angeles)

Life

Works

Reception

Games

References

Further reading