Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Seamus Blackley
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. He published his first paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance, as a Sophomore. 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 Technologys, 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 Unlimted 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 Trespasser, a physics-rich game published in 1998.
In Feburary 1999, Blackley joined Microsoft. Originally hired to work on DirectX, he wrote the intitial Xbox proposal, assembled and lead the team that designed and built the device, and 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, to provide more flexibility and creative control to game makers.
Today, Blackley is an agent with CAA, representing video game developers, evolving the position of video games within the entertainment industry.
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