Who we are

Role: Head of Marketing

Alex brings 14+ years experience in product marketing, brand marketing and communications. He got his start working on political campaigns across the country, and went on to guide marketing teams and initiatives for major gaming and tech brands including LinkedIn, Oculus and League of Legends, where he led a team focused on core game engagement.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / StarCraft

Role: Staff Software Engineer

Andrew spent 6+ years at Riot Games as a Software Engineer, working on the services and infrastructure that supports Riot's game platforms. Following a brief stint in finance at Bridgewater Associates, Andrew joins Theorycraft to get back to games.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Team Fortress 2 / Red Alert 2

Role: Lead Game Systems Designer

Andrew started his career as a research engineer before jumping into game development, and over his 18 year career has been blessed to work on genres he loves: MMOs, MOBAs, and most recently CCGs, where he was the Game Director for Legends of Runeterra, the League of Legends Card Game.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Legends of Runeterra / World of Warcraft / Magic: The Gathering

Role: Principal UX Designer

Angela started in the video game industry over 15 years ago and has since contributed to UI/UX design on applications and games across multiple platforms with titles like Wildstar and Diablo IV. She feels lucky to have found a way to combine her degree in psychology with her love of video games and interface development into a career path that recently gave her the opportunity to work as an associate game director on Diablo IV, but she still finds the most satisfaction in hands-on design and is looking forward to getting back to the nuts and bolts of UX at Theorycraft.

1000 hour games: Diablo IV / Final Fantasy XIV / World of Warcraft

Role: Principal Software Engineer

Anoop cares deeply about multiplayer games. He spent 9 years at Riot building world class multiplayer experiences on a wide variety of teams and games, including leading technology on League of Legends’s Champions Team and Teamfight Tactics.

Beginning with his love of Halo as a kid, Anoop has loved how multiplayer games can bring people together from different walks of life and is excited to do that at Theorycraft.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Magic: The Gathering / Minecraft / Halo

Role: COO

Areeb served as head of Global Revenue and Finance for League of Legends at Riot Games. In that position, Areeb played a central role in League’s overall product strategy and business intelligence efforts, while also leading League’s incredibly successful monetization design.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / World of Warcraft / Poker

Role: Senior Art and Outsourcing Producer

Ben fell in love with games the first time he ever saw someone jump into a Ghost in Halo: Combat Evolved.

“Wait, you can just ... do that? I need to try!”

From there, he developed a lifelong passion for competitive shooters that ultimately led him to Epic Games, where he started as an intern on Paragon but later became the Lead Art Producer for Fortnite BR (a role which landed him a spot in Forbes 30 under 30).

Ben spent 6+ years on Fortnite, shipping countless cosmetic and gameplay assets while managing a globally distributed team. He also drove art production for some of the biggest moments in the game's history, including The End/Black Hole event, Marshmello concert, and Travis Scott concert.

Role: Insights Principal

Brian has spent the last 5 years at Riot Games. Most recently, he was the product lead of an unreleased game in development. Prior to that, he worked on the gameplay and competitive teams on VALORANT. His focus has always been to leverage data to make games better, whether it's about game balance, matchmaking, or testing new game ideas.

Brian developed his love for games growing up in South Korea, playing way too much Starcraft for his own good. His favorite games are the ones that you can get better at with friends.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / VALORANT / Dota 2 / Smash / Starcraft

Role: Recruiting Director

Bryan brings over 16 years of total recruiting experience with roughly 11 years and counting in games. He has spent time recruiting talent in AAA, social, mobile, F2P, and most recently was the Recruiting Director at Bungie leading a team to support the staffing needs on Destiny and their other unannounced project(s).

1000 hour games: Counter-Strike / Call of Duty / GTA Online

Role: Senior Engineer

Ceren decided to pursue making games in high school when she played Portal 2 for the first time from start to finish in a single day. She moved from Turkey to the US to accomplish that goal. She kicked off her game development career at Halo Studios where she built online services powering matchmaking and skill.

She is most passionate about creating and playing games that organically create a community around them and bind unlikely people together in cooperation. She likes to rock climb, paddleboard, and make sculptural ceramics. In her free time, she plays video games sandwiched between her two cats.

1000 hour games: DotA 2 / Modded Minecraft / World of Warcraft

Role: Head of Community & Communications

Chris started his career as a competitive WoW blogger and games journalist. Since then, he's gone on to lead global community & communications strategy on titles like Scavengers, League of Legends, LoL esports, and the launch of VALORANT (he's the reason it's written in all-caps, sorry).

Chris loves asymmetrical team-based games and chasing high-risk, low-probability plays that baffle both enemies and teammates alike.

1000 hour games: VALORANT / PvP-based MMORPGs / Every FromSoftware game (AC, Sekiro, BB, Souls) / Monster Hunter

Role: Principal Game Designer

Craig is a technical designer with 18 years of game development experience. He joined the industry in QA and worked his way towards his dream job as a Game Designer. Being a generalist, Craig enjoys working on anything from level design, to combat mechanics, to anything-that-needs-to-get-done.

Craig has worked on over a dozen different games during his career. He spent 9 years working on Call of Duty, shipping MW3, Advanced Warfare, and COD: WWII. Craig's most recent project was MultiVersus with Player First Games/Warner Bros.

1000 hour games: Baldur's Gate / Smash Bros / Pokemon / Call of Duty / Halo / Guild Wars / Destiny / MultiVersus

Role: Principal Concept Artist

Dave has explored the wilds of the video game industry for 25 years, most notably as a creative leader at Insomniac Games for over two decades. As a Director of Character Art and Principal Artist, Dave helped define and guide the visual direction of the Ratchet & Clank franchise from the start, and served as a primary support for Insomniac’s numerous IP development efforts. All told, he’s shipped over 30 titles and somehow lived to tell the tale.

Dave’s love for cartooning, narrative, and all things Calvin & Hobbes continue to drive his work, but mostly provide a good excuse to not grow up too soon.

1000 hour games: Super Metroid / Team Fortress 2 / Fortnite

Role: Principal Gameplay Engineer

Devin got his start programming as a child writing trainers for online games and as a result he has an undying love for both programming and video games. He spent 9 years at Microsoft working on a range of different projects including a 4 year stint at Turn 10 studios working on Forza games as a gameplay engineer. After leaving Microsoft he worked at ProbablyMonsters for two years developing a new Multiplayer ARPG.

1000 hour games: DDR (specifically Extreme) / Final Fantasy 14 / The Dark Souls Trilogy

ROLE: Senior Game Designer

Devin is a die-hard competitive gamer, going so far as to become a world-ranked Super Smash Bros. player under his gamertag "Reslived." He began his professional career working in enterprise software and cloud architecture, but he transitioned to working in games when he joined as a designer on the MultiVersus team in early 2022. During his time on MultiVersus he worked on combat design and he assisted with the gameplay rework to upgrade the title to a rollback-enabled netcode framework. He continues to enjoy a variety of competitive games, finding new and interesting ways he can lose to his wife in their favorite games.

1000 hour games: Super Smash Bros. / League of Legends / Final Fantasy 14

Role: Technical Art Director

As the Lead Character Technical Artist, Dylan was core to Overwatch and Overwatch 2. He was fundamental to hero development, combat feel, live support, breakables, push game mode, ecologies, physics, and served as a vision holder for workflows and tools. Dylan is a competitive gamer to the core, and is extremely passionate about creating and playing, deep, multiplayer games that provide endless enjoyment. He also won a car on The Price Is Right.

1000 hour games: EverQuest / Overwatch / Call of Duty

Role: Associate Art Director

Ellinoora specializes in concept art, illustration and art direction. During her 11+ years of professional experience in the games industry, she has worked with IPs like Warcraft (World of Warcraft and Hearthstone), Overwatch, League of Legends, Angry Birds and Stranger Things. While admitting to having a competitive streak, Elli enjoys a variety of games - wherever there's a chance to geek out about great art and create great memories.

1000 hour games: Overwatch / Final Fantasy XIV / Genshin Impact

Role: Principal Software Engineer

Emerson has spent much of his life pursuing a passion for software engineering and software security. It's led to deep technical work in reverse code engineering, malicious code analysis, incident response, forensics, software engineering, and video game development. Most recently he was employed as a Principal Architect at Blizzard Entertainment working on gameplay integrity. Prior to that he worked at GoDaddy and CERT/CC, performing a wide range of security engineering work in both environments.

A dedicated PvP game player, he has about 25,000 total hours spread across various titles.

1000 hour games: Rocket League / League of Legends / Age of Empires III / World of Warcraft

Role: Software Architect

Felipe grew up in Bogotá, Colombia in the 90s (he was stabbed once, but still loves his hometown). He self-taught himself how to code and was hooked on gaming at a very early age. Felipe would go on to help organize many LANs (known as Fiestos) in Colombia, growing the community from locals, to city-wide, to country-wide. After Colombia, Felipe moved to the US help found a new independent game studio - PlayEveryWare - before going to ArenaNet to lead engine technology for Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. After that, he joined Riot Games to work on VALORANT from its early development to launch, then joining TiMi Studio as a Director of Technology.

Felipe loves fast-paced, competitive games, working out, 80s action movies, and producing music (metal, electronic, and post-hardcore).

1000 hour games: Quake 3 Arena / VALORANT / Escape from Tarkov / World of Warcraft

Role: Software Architect

For over 13 years, Garrett has spent his career building massively scaled world spanning online services. At Riot Games, he was most recently responsible for leading the development of VALORANT's online services, where he ensured players could play when they wanted and developers could spend more time making new features than fighting fires.

1000 hour games: EverQuest / Black Desert Online / VALORANT

Role: Senior Technical Sound Designer

Since 2017, Garrett has worked on titles such as Paladins, Realm Royale, Rogue Company, and Starsiege: Deadzone, with a focus on creating various audio systems and being the liaison between Game Design, Programming and Sound Designers.

He continues to find his creative spark by helping create the best systems and soundscapes needed to bring the vision of both art and gameplay to life through sound, and to serve the players by doing so.

Garrett is recently a new father, and enjoys spending time with family and friends, playing video games and board games, hiking, coffee, and watching Survivor.

1000 hour games: Call of Duty / Halo / Warcraft 3 / Heroes of the Storm

Role: Principal Software Engineer

Hemant spent over a decade building and operating high uptime, latency sensitive, mission-critical distributed systems and services in the financial world for Wall Street brokerages and banks before returning to the roots of his computing passion in games. He spent the last nearly 5 years at Riot architecting, building, operating and modernizing metagame and commerce services for League of Legends. Most recently he spent the last year working on game server and related core gameplay services for Project L.

Competitive games with strategic depth are his passion and he's a huge esports fan. He moonlighted as a volunteer referee on the LCS for years, loving the interaction with pro players and fans. He was also one of the onstage referees for the epic LoL World Championship finals in 2022 between DRX and T1.!

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Starcraft / Street Fighter II

Role: Principal Sound Designer

Isaac has spent the last 7 years at Riot Games, sound designing for both League of Legends and VALORANT. As part of the Champion Update Team on League of Legends and the Premium Content Team on VALORANT, he was integral in creating immersive soundscapes. Isaac’s favorite part of sound design is going out into the field and capturing unique “sonic experiences.” Which is the fancy way of saying shooting guns, setting things on fire, and destroying things to find the perfect sound.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Teamfight Tactics / VALORANT / Diablo

Role: Lead QA Engineer

James has spent the entirety of his adult life running testing on some of your favorite video games, and the rest of his life playing them. Passion personified, James thrives in an environment that changes rapidly.

Having run testing for the League of Legends Champions team over the past 7 years, James was approached to own the testing on Project Loki, and hasn't looked back since.

Now, 2 years later, James formally joins the Theorycraft Team, further bridging the gap between external QA and the development team.

1000 hour games: Vindictus / League of Legends / Binding of Isaac

Role: Staff Software Engineer

Jason loves playing and making competitive games that reward creativity and flashy plays. He spent the last four years at Riot Games working on VALORANT. As an engineer on the Progression Team, Jason built systems that enabled players to unlock and equip content to show off their personal style.

1000 Hour Games: League of Legends / Path of Exile / Teamfight Tactics

Role: Principal Core Tech Engineer

Brad grew up in a small town in Alabama. He was a "good with computers" kid and at some point realized that adults get paid to make video games, so he figured he'd give it a shot.

After graduating from college, Brad spent several years working on sports titles and shared tech at PlayStation San Diego. He then moved to Blizzard, where he spent 10 years on the Overwatch team working on tools, UI, and core engine tech. He most recently served as the Engine Systems Lead for Overwatch 2.

He now lives in Atlanta and is grateful that he can continue working with top-tier game developers at a fully remote studio.

1000 hour games: World of Warcraft / Hearthstone

Role: Senior Game Designer

Jeff has been playing competitive PvP games since 2007 (DotA Allstars 6.48b) and was lucky enough to turn his love for games into a career in 2016. Over his 5 years at Riot, Jeff led UX design for some of the most successful projects across the studio, most notably - League of Legends (Item Shop, Death Recap), Teamfight Tactics, and an unannounced title in R&D.

During that time, he also contributed as a system designer working on Ranked for both League of Legends and Wild Rift. Jeff believes that the best player experience comes from a lens of holistic design and is thrilled to be building great things here at Theorycraft.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / DotA / Ragnarok Online

Role: Lead VFX Artist

Jeremy has been in love with both the visual art and the mechanic design aspects of games for most of his life. As a visual effects artist, he gets to exist between the disciplines, communicating difficult gameplay concepts with rich thematics that invite players into game worlds.

Over the course of his career, Jeremy has contributed to AAA shooters like Call of Duty and Bioshock, multiple small indie games and solo-developed mobile games, as well as RnD projects at Riot Games. Now he is excited to be focused on delivering a clear and satisfying player experience for Theorycraft’s projects.

1000 hour games: DotA / Halo / World of Warcraft / Civ V / Left 4 Dead

Role: Animation Director

Since 2008, Jesse has helped contribute to studios like Electronic Arts, where he worked on The Sims franchise, and Blizzard Entertainment where he was a founding and long contributing member of the Overwatch team.

In his free time, Jesse enjoys playing co-op survival games with his friends, making espresso, and "food travelling" with his wife.

1000 Hour Games: Starsiege: Tribes / World of Warcraft / Overwatch

Role: Executive Producer

Jess grew up connecting and competing with her family and friends in Street Fighter 2, Soul Calibur and Smash. Fighting games, particularly Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur, inspired her to start learning gameplay and graphics programming - enabling her first game role developing weapons and enemy AI in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot. For the past ten years, Jess took her love for combat and PvP games to produce across all aspects of League of Legends - from Champions Producer in Season 2 to Executive Producer, as well as expanding League’s universe of deep games through the genesis of Teamfight Tactics. She also served on the executive team, esports council, and R&D council at Riot. Jess is excited to be hyper-focused on players first, creating something new and developing with a long-term view by joining Theorycraft.

Anyway, the more important and telling thing is that her mains are Kilik, Sheik, and Xerath.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Soul Calibur / Smash

Role: CEO

As Executive Vice President of League of Legends at Riot Games, Joe led one of the most successful franchise runs in gaming history. In addition to his role on League, Joe served on Riot’s executive team, R&D council, and global esports federation. Before Riot, Joe served as Executive Producer at Bungie on Destiny and Halo.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / DotA 2 / Halo

Role: Executive Producer

Belliss has worked in games-as-a-service for almost two decades now. He spent his first decade importing MMOs from Asia and publishing them in western regions. His second decade he hit the reset button and jumped over to Riot Games where he cut his teeth as a game developer.

He most recently was the Director of Production for Monetization and Personalization Content for League of Legends, and then later became the Game Director for League of Legends.

Belliss would definitely say he’s a competitive gamer first and foremost, but also has a deep passion for digital social experiences with his friends.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / World of Warcraft / ARK: Survival Evolved / Diablo 3

Role: Staff Game Designer

Josh has over 10 years of experience in games. He has worked on multiple world class shooters and beloved IPs helping design and build the highest quality content for free-to-play games. Josh most recently worked as a Senior Artist on a new, unannounced IP at Bungie. Prior to that, he contributed to every Destiny 2 release and worked for Yager in Berlin.

1000 hour games: Rainbow 6 Siege / Splinter Cell CT / Halo

Role: Art Director

Josh hails from Riot Games where he spent his last (and first) 9 years in the industry. Starting as an illustrator creating splash art for League of Legends, he also contributed to the Champions Team as a concept artist and art lead, and finally as Character Art Director on VALORANT. He joined Theorycraft to pursue his passion for creating unforgettable characters and universes. Outside of work Josh is inclined to spend his time adventuring in other worlds, be it West coast wilderness or imaginary realms of darkness.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / DotA 2 / World of Warcraft / Counter-Strike

Role: Lead Narrative Designer

Justin is a writer and narrative designer who's spent almost a decade working on competitive multiplayer games including Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, and StarCraft II. His chief passion is making gameplay better through narrative design. Whether that's via snappy dialogue, evocative worldbuilding, or silly jokes in flavor text, he's always looking for new ways to delight players and pull them into the world of the game. In his free time, he writes science fiction novels.

1000 hour games: DotA 2 / VALORANT / StarCraft II / Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)

Role: Staff Software Engineer

Justin has spent the last 9 years at Riot Games, working on both League of Legends and VALORANT. He was primarily focused on building the competitive features for VALORANT where he led the development of matchmaking, ranked systems, leaderboards and MMR. Outside of work, Justin can be found either gaming, snowboarding or playing beach volleyball.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / PUBG / VALORANT / Stardew Valley / Tibia

Role: World-building Concept Artist

While Kévin's initial motivation to pursue art as a career was to work in video games, the beginning of his career made him work in all kind of fields from advertising to table top games. These past years he worked in animation, participating on movies like Klaus, but mostly at Fortiche working on Riot's Arcane series, doing concept, colorscript and matte paintings.

1000 hour games: Dark Age of Camelot / Counter-Strike / SoulsBorne Games

Role: QA Manager

Kevin made the jump from lawyer to playtester 7 years ago when he started his career in the games industry and hasn't looked back since. On League of Legends, he worked across various parts of the game engine, testing to make sure that the game was playable regardless of how much of a potato your PC was. On VALORANT, he was primarily responsible for maximizing framerate and netcode so that you'd have no one to blame but yourself when you lost to that ego peek on C long.

Kevin loves high-mastery competitive games, turn-based tactics games, border collies, pickling veggies, and gardening.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / VALORANT / XCOM / PUBG / Path of Exile

Role: Principal Technical Designer

Kyle's passion is working on (and playing) PvP games that players can't stop thinking about. He worked as an engineer at Riot on internal tools and LoL meta game systems, helped ship a party pack at Jackbox Games, and then returned to Riot as a tech lead on the VALORANT Progression and Modes teams. On Modes he learned about game design and eventually led design on Escalation.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / PUBG / Escape from Tarkov

Role: Lead UI Artist

MacKay has spent 15 years in UI art, animation, UX, and technical design at places like Bungie, Microsoft, and Activision. He helped shape the look and feel of games like Destiny and Halo: Infinite and most recently served as UI/UX Lead on Marathon. He loves to take inspiration from all mediums and build UI that's thematic and immersive while amplifying functionality and usability.

Outside the olde home office, he loves woodworking and DIY projects, stress testing karaoke songs, tripping over storage boxes in his garage gym, sour ales, and reality shows that involve baking, sewing, or lip syncing.

1000 hour games: Overwatch / The Zeldas / Resident Evil 4

Role: Senior Software Engineer

Madilyn hails from New Jersey, where she fell in love with games as an art and as a means to connect with others.

In college, Madilyn conducted research in Computer-Human Interaction where she learned skills that she was able to bring to her internship turned full-time software engineer position at Blizzard Entertainment. For two years, she authored and maintained several tools and features for Overwatch and Overwatch 2. Besides making games, she enjoys roller skating, lifting, aerial dance, and art.

1000 hour games: Overwatch / CS:GO / Animal Crossing

Role: Lead Artist

Joining us from Blizzard Entertainment, Matt has spent 13 years professionally creating iconic character models, tools, scripts and shaders. Matt is a self-taught tinkerer who was responsible for building the Overwatch character team's texturing and baking pipeline, along with many other tools to support his teammates. Prior to Blizzard, Matt worked at Netdevil and Vigil games on various other titles. Matt brings a wide breadth of skills and is always eager to take on new challenges in any area of game development. He is thrilled to be joining the Theorycraft team!

1000 hour games: DotA / Heroes of Newerth / Day of Defeat / Diablo 2

Role: Head of Asia & Global Corporate Development

Michael has 14 years of experience leading operations and partnerships with global gaming organizations. He joined Tencent in 2010 to support their early international expansion efforts as they became the world’s largest games business. Michael led partnerships with Riot, Activision, EA, and Take-Two, as well as the initial investment in Epic Games. He later transitioned to ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda, as the General Manager of Asia Pacific. During his time at Zenimax, Michael built their Asia business and developed one of the company’s most successful mobile titles, Fallout Shelter Online.

After Microsoft acquired ZeniMax, Michael joined ByteDance to oversee their North American gaming business.

1000 hour games: Metal Gear Series / Super Smash Bros. / League of Legends

Role: CTO

Michael’s career in games spans two decades and three of the most storied game companies in the world (Bungie, Blizzard and Riot Games). As the Tech Lead for Valorant, Overwatch and Halo 1 and 2, Michael built multiple world class engineering teams and laid the foundations for industry-leading games and services, always with an eye on doing right by the player. And he does pretty good VO too.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / World of Warcraft / Oxygen Not Included

Role: Game Director

Tipul is obsessed with building multiplayer game systems that push players to compete against and alongside each other in dramatic, innovative ways. His twenty-year career in games includes design for Full Spectrum Warrior 2, The Saboteur, Halo: Reach, and Destiny. He also founded a (very) tiny independent game studio responsible for House of the Dying Sun. Most recently, Mike was a Creative Director at Bungie on an unannounced project.

1000 hour games: DotA 2 / Counter-Strike / EVE Online

Role: Lead Marketing Producer

Nathan started his career as an intern at Riot Games… then worked there another ten years. Across his time at Riot, Nathan worked on videos for the League of Legends champion team, the Legends of Runeterra launch, and the Arcane promotional campaign.

He loves roguelikes and is constantly seeking out spicy food.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / World of Warcraft

ROLE: China Publishing Manager

Nick has over 5 years in the gaming industry. Before that, he worked in consulting and market research. In 2020, he joined NetEase Games as a senior researcher where he played a pivotal role in delivering actionable insights to support the development of NetEase’s overseas studio projects.

In recent years, Nick transitioned into a Business Development Manager role, where he became a key driver in securing publishing partnerships for Marvel Snap in China.

Outside of work, Nick is a passionate basketball enthusiast, an avid shooter, and a dedicated NBA 2K series player.

1000 hour games: Overwatch / NBA 2K series / Counter-Strike / Honor of Kings

Role: Lead VFX Artist

Pete is positively obsessed with the feeling of landing skill shots and outplaying opponents. With a background split between technical art and VFX he seeks to create satisfying, punchy gameplay moments for players to master. He has worked on a broad range of projects including made-for-TV action movies, Diablo 4, and VALORANT and loves to share his grab bag of workflows in the course he teaches at Gnomon.

Outside of work Pete enjoys rollerblading with his Jack Russell Terrier mix, practicing traditional FX animation and server drama in V-Rising.

1000 hour games: Overwatch / Battlerite / League of Legends

Role: Senior Software Engineer

Peter is a lifelong gamer and California native. He was first introduced to games through the Diablo series, when he and his brothers would take turns delving into the bowels of Tristram. Since then, he always knew he wanted to work in game development, so he built up CS skills to break into the industry.

20 years and 2 degrees later he finally got his start as an AI engineer at the game studio Hangar 13. Moving from there he contributed to the Call of Duty series at Infinity Ward. And now he's super happy to join the team at Theorycraft, hoping to help develop a banger experience for isometric gamers everywhere.

1000 hour games: Diablo 2 / League of Legends / DotA 2 / Path of Exile / Super Smash Bros Melee

Role: Staff UI Engineer

Randy has wanted to make games since he was 10, building simple ones on his dad's Mac SE. Graduating from DigiPen Instititue of Technology, Randy entered the Seattle area games industry to work on Guild Wars 2, Halo 5, Bejeweled & Plants vs Zombies, and most recently Apex Legends.

You might know him from the survival-game modding scene as 'randyknapp', where his mods for Subnautica and Valheim have been downloaded over 2.9 million times.

Randy loves playing survival and exploration games, spending time with his wife and two daughters, and cooking delicious food.

1000 hour games: RimWorld / Project Zomboid / Valheim

Role: Lead Artist

As the Lead Character Artist on Overwatch and Overwatch 2, Renaud was instrumental in establishing the 3D visual identity of the IP. Being the first character artist on the team, he built the entire modeling and texturing character pipeline, establishing the unique look Overwatch’s heroes are known for. Always a fervent defender of stellar performance and efficiency, Renaud was a vision holder and advocate for pipeline optimization and good authoring practices. His relationship with design and engineering also allowed him to develop features and projects that the team didn’t think was initially possible. Prior to joining Blizzard, Renaud worked on games such as EverQuest, Guild Wars, and the Elder Scroll series.

1000 hour games: Quake 3 / Overwatch / World of Warcraft

Role: Lead Environment Artist

Rodrigo grew up in Brazil mostly playing games and doing poorly in school. In his early 20's, he moved to Canada after learning that one could actually make a living by helping create all those fantastic words he fell in love with. His first contact with the production side of games was at EA on Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, which only caused his love toward world-building to grow stronger. Most recently, through Airborn Studios, he has worked as a outsourcer on all sorts of colorful worlds, including the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Crash Bandicoot 4, and Fortnite, among others. Now he is joining Theorycraft with the intention of helping out with the creation of the most fun game in the world with the community.

1000 hour games: Ragnarok Online / Team Fortress 2 / League of Legends

Role: Director of Live Services

Ryan has worked in live service games for the last 16 years. During that time, he helped ship many of League of Legends’ early champions, as well as leading the launches of League's early regional servers. He worked on Dawngate, helping get the title to beta. Most recently, Ryan was a technical product manager for VALORANT's devops org which managed its global server footprint, maintained the underlying development build tech, and delivered new patches to players every two weeks.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Soul Calibur 3 / Halo 3

Role: Staff Software Engineer

Ryan started his career working in enterprise cloud security then made the jump to games when he joined Riot in 2017. Almost exclusively working on the backend services that power League of Legends, he was with Riot for 6 years, navigating the complexities of a decade old game and revitalizing its even older tech stack.

Ryan loves playing games, both casually and competitively, as a way to stay connected with friends, near and far. His favorite games rely heavily on skill and being able to outplay a bad situation through having 'better hands' instead of always having to outsmart someone. But, at the end of the day, cozy games have become a new favorite genre for him to relax with.

1000 hour games: Counter-Strike / League of Legends / Stardew Valley

Role: Staff Game Designer

Sai served as a leader in Analytics and Insights for nearly a decade at Riot Games, working with product leads on LoL, LoR, and new R&D teams. He helped establish how LoL designers should use data to inform decisions, laid the foundation for the LoR data ecosystem, and supported the development of an Insights team focused on making a difference for players.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / PUBG / Path of Exile / Magic: The Gathering

Role: Director of Influencer Marketing

Shaun spent the first few years of his career working in fashion and ecom, focusing on social media and influencer marketing. He most recently spent the last 6.5 years working at mobile publisher Gameloft where he last headed the Global Influencer Marketing team, leading strategy and execution for games like Disney Dreamlight Valley, Disney Speedstorm, Asphalt 9 and more.

Shaun is a huge fan of competitive games, having played professional Call of Duty 1-2 himself. He also enjoys daddy duties with his daughter and playing a good round of golf on the weekends.

1000 hour games: Call of Duty series / World of Warcraft / League of Legends

Role: China Publishing Manager

Sophie has over 13 years of experience in the gaming industry. Early in her career, she worked at The 9 and gumi, focusing on overseas game licensing and publishing projects for the Chinese market. Over the past five years, she has primarily worked at Zenimax, where she played a key role in managing local development and publishing partnerships, and contributed to expanding the distribution network for major Zenimax IP franchises in Asia, including Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.

Sophie enjoys the fun and social aspects of gaming. Outside of work, one of her favorite ways to unwind is playing video games with her son.

1000 hour games: League of Legends / Teamfight Tactics / The Legend of Zelda series

Role: Principal Game Designer

Tom brings 25 years of game-making experience. His career began in Quality Assurance before growing into Design, with a focus on Level Design and Worldbuilding.

He has contributed to large AAA as well as small indie studios, including EA and Blizzard Entertainment. He has contributed to several iconic titles, such as the Medal of Honor franchise and Diablo 3. He also spent several years on Project Titan

Tom is a devoted father who loves spending time with family. He's an avid gamer, golfer and scratch DJ.

1000 hour games: Diablo 3 / World of Warcraft / Dark Souls / Elden Ring

Role: Engineering Manager

Tom loves creating games with memorable stories that players can treasure for a lifetime. In the past decade of his career, he has contributed to engineering for The Sims 3 @ EA, Overwatch @ Blizzard, and LoL @ Riot Games. Most recently, Tom was an Engineering Manager at Riot on a R&D game project.

1000 hour games: Counter-Strike / Starcraft / League of Legends

Role: Senior Software Engineer

Willy started his career in games at Riot Games in 2016. As an engineer in Riot R&D, he built gameplay systems and characters, as well as online services and metagame systems for games like Project L. He was most recently at Mountaintop Studios working on a R&D project.

Willy loves social and competitive games that create moments that can be remembered for years.

1000 hour games: Team Fortress 2 / DotA 2 / Super Smash Bros Melee / Apex Legends