The DePaul Game Dev Industry Advisory Board

Our Industry Advisory Board is comprised of executives from major game companies in the Chicago area. The board members are active contributors to our Game Dev program, offering advice on curriculum changes such as the Programming and Production/Design concentrations, attending course critiques, and even participating in the Senior Capstone project. This year three board members, Matt Booty, Alexander Seropian and Eugene Jarvis, served as “publishers” for the Capstone project teams. Students periodically presented their progress to their board member, and were critiqued regarding creativity, technical accomplishment, visual appeal and achieving milestones. Three Advisory Board members served as judges of the 2008 Game Jam: Eugene Jarvis (who also devised the theme for the competition), Matt Booty and Dan Kaufman.

Current Advisory Board members:

Matt Booty, CEO and President, Midway Games
Alexander Seropian, President of Wideload Games
Denny Thorley, President of Day 1 Studios
Eugene Jarvis, President of Raw Thrills, Inc.
Dan Kaufman, Software Development Director at High Voltage Software

Matt Booty, CEO and President, Midway Games

Board member since 2006

Prior to becoming Midway’s CEO and President, Matt served as the Senior Vice President — Worldwide Studios. Prior to that he worked at Midway Amusement Games, LLC in various capacities in its product development organization, ultimately being promoted to Vice President — Product Development in June 2002.

Matt started at Midway in 1991 as an audio engineer working on hardware and software for pinball and video sound systems. His first major project was the DCS digital sound system, which was used in coin-op pinball, video, novelty and gaming for more than six years after its development. From 1992 to 1995 he was the manager of the Sound Department and led the integration of professional recording techniques and equipment into game audio and the expansion of the group to a peak of seven composers and an audio engineer. In 1995 Matt moved into game programming and worked on the infamous 3D fighting game War Gods, which was, among other things, the first hard disk-based coin-op game developed at Midway. His first project as a team leader and game designer was the arcade game Hyperdrive in 1996, and after that in 1998 he was the team leader on the coin-op racing game CART Fury which was then released for the Sony Playstation2. In the spring of 2001 Matt joined the NFL Blitz 20-02 football team as the project manager and also played a similar role on the MLB Slugfest 20-03 baseball team. He has BS degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering and has a Master of Fine Arts degree, all from Purdue University.

Alexander Seropian, President of Wideload Games

Alexander Seropian

Board member since 2006

Alexander Seropian is the founder and CEO of Wideload Games, Inc. At Wideload, Alex has crafted a new kind of game developer that utilizes an external development model similar to film production. Alex began his career as the founder and CEO of Bungie Software. Alex grew Bungie to become a leading independent developer of video games and member of the Inc 500. Under his guidance, Bungie created some of the most celebrated game franchises in the industry, including Marathon, Myth, Oni, and Halo. In 2000, Alex negotiated the acquisition of Bungie by Microsoft and launched Halo for the Xbox. Halo is the best selling and foremost franchise title for the Xbox, having shipped over ten million units. Halo is the recipient of the 2002 AIAS console game of the year award.