Ernest Adams to Visit Entertainment Technology Center

Author: by Beth A.

Noted computer game designer, author, and teacher Ernest Adams will visit Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. from September, 25-26 as the first stop on his 2006 U.S. fall lecture circuit. Adams has spent 17 years in the computer game industry as a design consultant, lead designer, producer and software engineer—and was an engineer in the CAD industry for seven years before that. He designed games for Electronic Arts from 1992-1999 and was the audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line. He left EA to become lead game designer for Bullfrog Productions Ltd. A member of the International Hobo game design consortium, Adams now lives in England and travels around the world providing game design and production consulting services to a range of clients including Ubisoft, THQ, Elixir Studios, Guinness World Records, Ragdoll, Glu Mobile, Terraplay AB and others. “It’s a tremendous honor to have Ernest Adams visit the ETC,” said Jesse Schell, assistant professor of entertainment technology who teaches the ETC’s ‘Building Virtual Worlds’ class and is CEO of Schell Games. “I’m sure the students here will make the most of the opportunity." Adams has published two textbooks on game design, Fundamentals of Game Design (Prentice-Hall, 2006) and Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams: On Game Design (Prentice-Hall, 2003), the first comprehensive books on commercial game design for both on-the-job and student game developers. He also wrote Break Into the Game Industry: How to Get a Job Making Video Games (McGraw-Hill, 2003). “My design philosophy,” Adams has said, “is that computer games are made to fulfill dreams." While at the ETC, Adams will speak to students and conduct workshops and seminars for ETC faculty, spin-offs and partners. Watch the ETC Calendar for details on the schedule as it is finalized. For more about Adams, his credentials, clients, lectures, and recent news items, visit the Designer's Notebook.