Andy Schatz Email & Phone Number

I founded Pocketwatch Games in January, 2005, and made our first title, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa in 10 months for $8000. The sequel to that title, Venture Arctic, is an ecosystem simulator, and incorporates environmental themes such as climate change and extinction.Pocketwatch's third game broke new ground -- Monaco is a co-op crime caper in the vein of Ocean's 11 and other classic heist movies. It won the two most prestigious awards for indie games, the 2010 IGF Grand Prize and the 2010 IGF Excellence in Design. Monaco sold nearly 2 million copies as of 2021 since its launch in 2013.As a followup, we tackled an entirely new genre and faced a notoriously difficult design challenge: Tooth and Tail is a gamepad-controlled Real Time Strategy game. It also went on to great acclaim and healthy sales.Currently, Pocketwatch Games is working on the sequel to Monaco in partnership with Humble Games.My history in the industry is as an engineer first, but also as a designer and marketer. At Presto Studios I was an Artificial Intelligence and User Interface engineer, where I worked on several titles, including Whacked!, the first ever online console title. My UI design for the Xbox Live interface was used by Microsoft as the foundation for their Recommended User Interface whitepaper. At e-tractions I was solely responsible for puttin together a christmas card that (years later) went viral. You may have seen it, it's the Christmas Snowglobe that you can shake with the little screaming people inside.I've been published in numerous high profile gaming publications, such as Penny Arcade, PC Gamer Magazine, Gamasutra, and more. My talk at the 2011 Game Developer's Conference was the second highest rated Summit talk at the entire conference.Specialties: Game Development: Design, Engineering, Production

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  Studio Director, Owner

  Pocketwatch Games

  Del Mar, Ca, Us