Ben Throop is a Game Developer, 3D Modeler, Texturer, Animator, FX Artist, Technical Artist, Graphic Designer, Flex Programmer, Web Developer, Second-rate Server Administrator, and Dad.

He worked in the video game industry from 1998 to 2007 on Playstation 1, PS2, Wii, PC, DS, Game Boy Advance, XBox 360, PS3, and PSP titles while living in the East, West, and exactly inbetween. He held roles of Lead Character Artist, Senior Artist and FX Artist for Sony, and Lead Technical Artist for Activision in that time, and got dirty in the trenches working on games that seemed to always build their engines, teams, and game designs from the ground up simultaneously.  Despite these circumstances and several canceled projects, he earned the nickname “The Enthusiaser” for naively believing that any project can succeed with a positive attitude.

Since then he learned the hard way that game projects demand an incredibly delicate balance of planning, experience, and resources to be worth the time, effort, talent, and money expended on them. In the future, he is looking forward to working with teams that already demonstrate this. For the record, of his remaining former employers, each has successfully transformed into wildly successful development shops. He’d like to think he helped.

In 2007 he founded Emergent Behavior LLC and created Mrs. Riley, which is not a game and was not for lack of a better term, easy. Mrs. Riley includes a Flex application which helps people create visual learning materials for kids with Autism and is generally thought of as being pretty darn helpful if I do say so myself. It was built on the idea that simple tasks should be simple to do and was patterned entirely unsuccessfully after 37 Signals “Getting Real”, which doesn’t mention that you need to actually know how to program in your target platform before you can incorporate the “Real” part. After spending a fair amount of time in the “Getting” phase as he learned Flex, PHP, Drupal, and how to not do everything three times, he successfully launched in March 2009 and now maintains the growing site and community part time.

Going forward, Ben is actively seeking work as a Game Development Generalist on great teams developing:

• Unity 3D Games
• iPhone Games
• Console and PC Games

He thinks that nowadays there is a new demand for Game Development Generalists who can make art, design, and code depending on the constantly fluxuating needs of a team, yet still provide highly specialized skills (Modeling/Texturing/Animating/FX/Scripting) for when production demands. He’d love to talk to teams that could use a guy like this. He recently contributed to FX on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for Xbox 360 and PS3 and is currently working on Unity iPhone and Web games with the swell folks at Infrared5.

He wrote this in the third person because he thinks it sounds even more true when someone else says it.