Bill Dugan Email and Phone Number

Ran two game teams working on the Gears of War franchise for The Coalition, the Microsoft studio.

I ran several small teams that built, shipped, and ran live services for games for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Fire TV, and Fire phone platforms. This included several launch titles for new hardware. I ran engineering teams that designed and built a telemetry system, a world authoring tool and server platform, a downloader/patcher, a build system in the cloud, and an automated testing framework. I also ran the Alexa OS Personalization team, and became a Kanban instructor. (Sr. Mgr, Technical Program Management)

I founded the company, recruited partners, negotiated and conducted all business development, and produced all games. As with people at any startup, I did a little of everything, and as the president was ultimately responsible for everything. We self-published an XBLA game called Schizoid, which was the launch title for Microsoft’s XNA framework on Xbox 360; we shipped another XBLA game for PopCap; and did several years of prototyping and contracting for Microsoft.

Back on the developer side after having worked on the publisher side for the last two jobs, I was the EP on Spider-Man 2, where the team innovated a ton within the constraint of this being a movie license game; it’s still usually listed as one of the top 3 superhero video games. For a time I also ran the Ultimate Spider-Man and Dead Rush projects; maximum headcount was about 120 people.

I was recruited to manage Sierra’s publisher relationship with Valve, and was the publisher-side executive producer for console games like Half-Life for PlayStation 2 and several other console original-IP games and console ports.

I established and built out the WotC computer games group, building Magic: the Gathering Online, a Dungeons & Dragons MMO called “Crawl” (later cancelled), and other titles using WotC IP which were created with external developers.

I worked my way up through the video game development and publishing business at Interplay, starting as a level designer and scripter for Wasteland in 1986, and starting as a producer in 1991. I produced games both on the developer and publisher sides, and did some software engineering along the way, and for a while my job title was “Macintosh High Priest”.