OUR TEAM

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.

Iconic games: Pokémon Red & Blue / Super Smash Bros / League of Legends

Role: Design Director

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.

Iconic games: Magic: The Gathering / World of Warcraft / Duke Nukem

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.

Iconic games: Final Fantasy VII / Final Fantasy XI / Portal

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.

Iconic games: Magic: The Gathering / The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion / Halo 2

Role: CEO

Areeb is one of the original founders and now serves as CEO. From 2015 to 2020, he was Riot Games’ global revenue lead for League of Legends, where he helped grow the business and contributed across product strategy, business intelligence, and monetization. He also incubated Teamfight Tactics Mobile, including co-developing a China SKU with Tencent.

Iconic games: World of Warcraft / Hades / The Witcher 3

Role: Principal Game Designer

Chris began training for his gaming career at an early age on the Atari 2600 and accidentally stumbled into the game industry in 1995. While his picture may imply he is a Wizard, Chris' skill tree has taken a multi-class spec route with a primary focus on design. The regrettable side effect of multi-class is that it takes three times as long to level up all the skills in parallel. Now, three decades later every time he thinks he is close to maxing out, new skills are unlocked that need to be leveled up. Who designed this game anyway? 

Chris has been leading and designing games at AAA game studios like Ubisoft and Amazon as well as smaller independent studios like Atomic Games, Phoenix Labs, and most recently People Can Fly.

Iconic games: Adventure (1980) / Herzog Zwei / Quake

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.

Iconic games: Star Wars: X-Wing  / Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 / Halo

Role: Creative Director

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.

Iconic games: Super Metroid / Full Throttle / Curse of Monkey Island

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.

Iconic games: Super Smash Bros / Starcraft 2 / Borderlands

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.

Iconic games: Half-Life / Breath of the Wild / Everquest

Role: Chief Technology Officer

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.

Iconic games: Everquest / Half-Life / Dune 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.

Iconic games: League of Legends / Diablo / Halo

Role: Principal Software 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.

Iconic games: World of Warcraft / Final Fantasy IV / Overwatch

Role: Creative Director

Jeremy shipped the Open Beta for SUPERVIVE as Lead VFX Artist before moving into Game Design, creating the character kit designs for Carbine, Mercury, and Nyx.  Now he serves as creative lead for a new project at Theorycraft.

Iconic games: Bioshock / Halo 2 / World of Warcraft

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.

Iconic games: Okami / Slay the Spire / Balatro

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.

Iconic games: Valheim / ARK / League of Legends

Role: Senior 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.

Iconic games: Halo / League of Legends / Exile II - The Ruined World

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.

Iconic games: Ocarina of Time / Resident Evil 4 / Overwatch

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.

Iconic games: Silent Hill 2 / Undertale / Wind Waker

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!

Iconic games: Psychonauts / Morrowind / DotA

Role: Animation Director

In the distant year of 2000, an aspiring developer realized his dream of perpetuating his obsession with video games to future generations. Michael has since had the great fortune of working on titles like God of War, Overwatch, Titanfall, Valorant, and the famed Ooga Booga. Rounding out his nerd badge, he's spent countless hours as Dungeon Master, building D&D worlds conspicuously lacking dragons and/or dungeons. Other hobbies include hiking, biking and Helldiving. Claims to do all his own stunts.

Iconic games: Gemstone (MUD) / EverQuest 1 / Wizardry 7

Role: Marketing Director

Nathan brought his love of storytelling and film to an internship at Riot Games, where he stayed for ten years. Throughout his time at Riot, Nathan worked on videos and marketing campaigns for League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, and Arcane. He loves roguelikes and is constantly seeking out spicy food.

Iconic games: A Link to the Past / FTL / Golden Sun 2

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.

Iconic games: Divinity Original Sin 2 / Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun / Terraria

Role: Staff Software 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.

Iconic games: Half-Life / Starcraft / Valheim

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.

Iconic games: Bioshock / Ragnarok Online / Counter-Strike

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.

Iconic games: A Link to the Past / Dark Souls / 13 Sentinels