Seamus Blackley

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A May 2005 picture of Seamus Blackley, at his desk at CAA.

Seamus Blackley is an agent with Creative Artists Agency representing video game creators.

After entering Tufts University to study jazz piano, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis. As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. After college, he studied High Energy Physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, until the Superconducting Supercollider project was cancelled in 1993.

Blackley then went to work at Blue Sky Productions, later called Looking Glass Studios. In addition to work there on Ultima Underworld and System Shock, Blackley helped to create the sophisticated physics system in Flight Unlimited. He is mentioned in the Flight Unlimited manual as follows:

As far back as 1992, we started looking for new ways to fly on the PC. Seamus Blackley, a physics expert and experienced pilot, had just been hired on at Looking Glass Technologies, and he was well placed to see where the current simulators fell short of what they could be.

He was no longer working with the company when Flight Unlimited II was being developed. As a result, the second and third games did not have quite as sophisticated physics (though still arguably better than other games of the time), and the series became more civilian in nature.

After Looking Glass, Blackley worked at Dreamworks Interactive as executive producer of Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a physics-rich game published in 1998.

In February 1999, Blackley joined Microsoft. Originally hired to work on DirectX, he co-wrote the initial Xbox proposal, and helped assemble the team that designed and built the device. He then evangelized the Xbox to game developers around the world.

Blackley left Microsoft to co-found Capital Entertainment Group with former Microsoft co-worker Kevin Bachus after his time developing the Xbox. CEG aimed to reform the financing models available in the game industry, following the Hollywood studio model, to provide more flexibility and creative control to game makers, and loosen the grip publishers had on control of the game industry. CEG was unable to complete a game before folding in 2004.

Currently, Blackley represents video game developers at the Creative Artists Agency, evolving the position of video games within the entertainment industry.

[edit] Quotations

"The scariest thing was […] a bunch of fifty-five year old men, who have never played a game in their lives, decided they’re gonna do a game console and then start talking about the specifications […] This is like a group of men designing tampons or something […] it’s like a very bad idea."^[1] - Seamus Blackley, Warren Spector's Master Class Video Games and Digital Media, UT at Austin, November 2007