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Gas Powered Games was founded in May 1998 by acclaimed game designer and industry visionary, Chris Taylor. The founding principle for GPG was to create immersive AAA games that push the boundaries of interactive entertainment.
The company's first project, Dungeon Siege, was released in April 2002, and its sequel, Dungeon Siege II was released in August 2005. Both games were critical and commercial successes, selling in excess of 1.7 million copies. Other games in the Dungeon Siege franchise include Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony for the PSP (developed cooperatively with SuperVillian Studios) and Dungeon Siege II: Deluxe Edition.
GPG followed the success of Dungeon Siege with Supreme Commander, a revolutionary RTS game that has been hailed by critics for its innovative gameplay, Strategic Zoom and streamlined Command & Control system. Supreme Commander received numerous Editors' Choice awards and went on to critical and commercial success.
Recent and current projects include Space Siege, Demigod, and Supreme Commander 2.
With its office in the Pacific Northwest, GPG is a short distance from Seattle, Washington and currently employs over 60 of the industry's best designers, programmers, writers and artists.
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| Bert Bingham |
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Producer
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Bert "Sleepy" Bingham began his career in the games industry as a co-founder and Senior Mission Director for the combat simulation center known as "The Otherside".
Having directed over 4500 multiplayer combat missions, he turned his attention and unique experience toward helping the Gas Powered Team develop the original Dungeon Siege in 2001.
Since that time he has been involved in assisting production on every title GPG has released, and is currently developing an as-yet-unannounced addition to the GPG family.
Bert spends his spare time hiking, skiing, traveling, and playing Strategy and RPG games just enough to keep his callsign valid.
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| Sung Campbell |
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Senior Artist
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Sung is a recent graduate from The Art Institute of Seattle.
Favorite color: White
Favorite movie: Gladiator
Favorite food: T-bone steak
Favorite TV show: Lost
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| Josiah Colborn |
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Outsource Coordinator
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Josiah’s in it for the games.
Making games professionally since 2005, Josiah’s interests have led him to a diverse and fun-filled career. With a foundation in QA, and training from the Art Institute of Seattle, Josiah has worn the hats of QA Team Lead, Character Animator, Art Lead and Creative Lead. His love of games has made Josiah comfortable and successful wearing each of these hats, providing a broad understanding of the creative and organizational side of game development. Lately, he wears a giant, fuzzy hat labeled “GPG”.
With a passion for unique, player-driven game experiences, Josiah often pursues hobby projects, from mobile phone games to pen & paper roleplaying systems.
Josiah has lived in the Seattle area for most of his life and currently resides in Kent with his wife, Desiree, and two daughters.
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| Chris Daroza |
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Associate Designer
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Chris has been an avid gamer since the days of the Colleco Vision. He enjoyed Art at an early age and eventually attended Cornish College of The Arts studying Illustration. After a few years realizing that he enjoyed the idea of creating video games much more than becoming a traditional illustrator he decided to switch over to a Game Design Degree and attended courses at Lake Washington Technical College. Soon after he went into QA and then Production at GPG. In addition Fallout 2 is the greatest game ever made!
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| Gordon Duclos |
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Engineer
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In a moment, a breath for a reflection.
The gripping angst, while we walk the line between life, and what cannot be.
I stumble upon the steps of the ancient laboratory that soon would become my home.
Experiments dark and mysterious wrought with sub-conscious fear.
A secret friendship churns study of nature.
Outcast and shaved, the little one adventures into the wild.
Swirling decay whips us around as we swallow swells of purification.
Drowning no longer in reality dislocation.
The deepest blue in the center of nowhere.
Thousands of stones apart in the place that man should never be.
Resolution in piracy, lunacy becomes normalcy.
Whirlwinds of rage, soothing peace.
Lyrical incantations of science and philosophy, weave a dragon's fire, a soul.
The armies of the oppressor fold this ring of poverty.
Inklings of digital wisdom shape obsession.
A woman, an empire, the rebellion, assassination, and resolution.
To be lost in the future and past, where did the sands of presence leave us?
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| Brian Fricks |
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Senior Designer
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Brian Fricks, aka Trailstorm-Radeem, recently embarked on his first official adventure into the world of game design. Formerly a tenured teacher of visual arts at a most amazing public elementary school in Durham North Carolina, Brian found his way to Kirkland Washington and GPG through modding in the Dungeon Siege Community. Yes, it really can happen. Spending forty or more hours weekly (on top of the typical super-hero teacher's work schedule), and working on several small and large modding projects, including his own Circle of Lorent, Brian achieved sufficient levels of sleeplessness to qualify for a career change. Three thousand four hundred miles, two tires, and the entire collection of Harry Potter books on CD later, Brian now contentedly cranks out dungeons, wilderness, caves, and ruins in between eager requests for mule-i-corns, light-rays, and scale 5 Krug with scale 10 sledgehammers.
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| Michelle Hippe |
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VP of Business Operations
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Michelle is thrilled to work with creative geniuses every day!
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| John Holes |
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Production Assistant
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John grew up in rural central Pennsylvania in the ‘80s. As a teenager, he tended cattle and other livestock, harvested crops and picked blueberries among other tasks on his parents’ farm. From a young age, he loved arcade games and Atari games, and he bought a Nintendo Entertainment System with his allowance as soon as he could.
Programming in BASIC in high school, he ran into the first of many coding frustrations when his BASIC code filled the floppy disk for the graphical text adventure he was writing, and the overflow line formatted the entire disk so that he had to start writing the entire game again from scratch. In college, as first a Computer Science major before switching to Comparative Literature, he became interested in the idea of writing for video games. But he wanted to get into the game industry as quickly as possible, so he headed for Washington and put in many fun years as a Nintendo Game Play Counselor. At Nintendo, he continued to play through games until his completion conquests numbered in the hundreds.
When Internet killed the counseling service, he eventually moved after some false, non-game-related starts into quality assurance testing of games at notable companies such as Enix of America, ArenaNet, Nintendo, and for Sega, working in-house at Gas Powered Games on Space Siege. After a brief repartee with software test engineering on Gears of War 2 and some other projects at Microsoft, he obtained a certificate in Digital Gaming, training that he now plans on putting to use in his current dream role as a Production Assistant at his favorite game company to work at, Gas Powered Games.
While a long-time fan of RPG games, John has evolved into a strategy game fanatic, especially those of the turn-based variety. His current gaming interests are experiencing casual core and browser-based games containing deep strategy elements. When not playing video games, his other favorite pastimes include gamemastering tabletop RPG sessions and playing board and card games.
John’s long-time legendary role model that he aspires to be like in the industry is Ultima creator Richard Garriott. Beginning with his time on Space Siege, John’s continual encounters with GPG visionary Chris Taylor have made Chris a second local and immediate figure for John to emulate.
As our world grows in complexity, John foresees all real-world activities becoming more gamelike where they overlap with digital interfaces due to the potential for enhanced interactivity, sophisticated resource/time management and the cognitive immersion inherent in working with faster-than-thought digital processes.
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| Matt Kehm |
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Assistant Designer
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Matt was born and raised in the great state of Nebraska. He spent a good chunk of his childhood having various adventures with his friends and family(including his faithful dogs!) across the rolling hills and green forests along the banks of the Missouri River. Matt and his friends also had other adventures as well, playing Dungeons and Dragons on many a winter weekend. His first video game experience was actually Pong, but it was the text adventure Zork that really got him hooked. In college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Go Huskers!) many a night were spent playing Civilization.
Matt’s dream had always been to get into the video game industry. After having spent several years in research & marketing, Matt had the opportunity to be part of the team at Gas Powered Games in December 2010. Matt credits his wife Elisabeta for encouraging him to keep pursuing his dream and to never give up on it.
In his spare time Matt enjoys playing games (duh), rooting on his Nebraska Cornhuskers, and landscaping projects around the house.
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| James Loe |
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Sr Software Engineer
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James has been working in the games industry since 1997, when he joined Chris Taylor at Cavedog Entertainment for the final months of development on Total Annihilation. Since that time he has worked on a number of titles, including Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, the ill-fated Good & Evil, and Gas Powered Games' first title, Dungeon Siege. When not at work he keeps himself busy with R/C cars, the latest console RPG's, and attempting to keep all his shots in the 10-ring down at the local range. If you look carefully you might even find him attending the occasional Magic tournament in the Seattle area.
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| Kevin Pun |
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Senior Artist
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Kevin was born in Hong Kong but immigrated to the U.S. when he was twelve. Even as a wee little kid, he wanted to draw and draw he did. He drew on the floor, the wall, school books, you name it. Some of his favorite subjects were drawing various Japanese anime and live action heroes. In the U.S. Kevin initially had some trouble speaking English but thanks to religously watching TV shows like Happy Days, Brady Bunch and Family Ties, his language barrier was broken in no time flat.
School was a significant period for Kevin. Among many things, he discovered girls, comics and D&D. Unbelievably even with his dashing good looks, he would have little luck with girls but he was hooked on role-playing and superheroes. He found much pleasure creating his own Melinda the Fox comic, drawing D&D character portraits and illustrating modules that he would run. By the time he was ready for college his art was looking pretty decent but unfortunately majoring in art was never in the deck. Citing many examples of starved artists, Kevin's parents successfully talked Kevin into studying Civil Engineering.
Eventually Kevin graduated from the University of Washington. While waiting for job interviews, he dabbled in the professional comics field, trying one last time to get an art career going. In 1990, he penciled a short story in Manga Monthly #2 (Fathom Press) and made a pin-up of Trixie from Speedracer sitting on top of the Mach 5 in a Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Issue (Fantagraphics). Kevin's parents were almost right as he discovered that comics work paid very little and Fathom Press closed down, killing the deal to do more Manga Monthly. As fate would have it, just when he was about to give up on art, a local upstart games company was desperate for artists. Having to choose between engineering or making game art, it took him about two seconds to make the right decision. The rest was history.
Over the years Kevin worked with many different games companies and various gaming platforms. Some of his past published games included: Inspector Gadget (PC), King Arthur and the Knights of Justice (SNES), Secret of Evermore (SNES), and Total Annihilation (PC). A member of GPG since February 2000, Kevin is proud to be a part of the Dungeon Siege development team.
Kevin enjoys spending his spare time with his wonderful wife, Sophia. Whenever she is not paying attention he collects a scary amount of action figures and Gundam models. One prized toy in his collection is the 1979 18 inch Alien figure from Kenner. Music and movie wise, he digs Hong Kong pop singer, Gigi Leung and wishes that the obscure 80's romantic comedy, Electric Dreams will make it on DVD soon.
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| Aimee Rickerson |
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Accounting
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| Mike Swanson |
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Studio Art Manager
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Mike started making games back in 1987 working on a touch-screen laserdisc driven golf simulation machine for Joytec - the $40,000 machine has sensors for your weight shift and for which club you were using and featured all the best holes of Hawaii (using real video) and had to be surrounded by lexan barriers in case the golf ball on the swivel broke off and killed someone......
We sold 6 units before folding.
After that it was creating art and as an art lead for EA for 10 years, then managing art at Lucasarts for 3.5 years and then 1+ year at Take 2 creating artwork for a yet unpublished RTS drug-dealing game called SNOW (go figure!)
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| Chris Taylor |
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CEO/Founder
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Chris Taylor began his career in the video games business at Distinctive Software in Canada. His first title, Hardball II was a sequel to the popular Hardball, and won the SPA (Software Publishers Association) award for best sports game of the year. Next, Chris created 4D Boxing, which won many accolades for its innovation as a 3D title. Chris later served as designer and project lead for the original Triple Play Baseball at Electronic Arts.
Chris went on to create the highly acclaimed RTS, Total Annihilation, at Cavedog Entertainment. After completing the expansion pack, The Core Contingency, he decided to start his own company. Chris founded Gas Powered Games in May of 1998 in Kirkland, WA. GPG released its first title, Dungeon Siege for the PC in April of 2002. Chris and Gas Powered Games have established themselves as an innovator in both technology and gameplay, and are now working on the next round of games to be released in the near future.
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| Morien Thomas |
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Art Director
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| Gautam Vasudevan |
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Lead Engineer
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The first thing Gautam learned to program were games. Starting with programming text-adventures, and eventually moving on to arcade games and first-person shooters, Gautam found himself game-programming professionally after graduating from UCLA in 2003. Now at Gas Powered Games, Gautam continues to forge his game-creation legacy through his programming skills. His hobbies include playing tennis (when the Northwest weather cooperates), feeding his inner info-junkie, and honoring his Canadian roots with his unwavering support of the Calgary Flames.
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