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 has worked in the video game industry since 1998 on Playstation 1, PS2, Wii, PC, DS, Game Boy Advance, XBox 360, PS3, and PSP titles while living in the East, West, and a few places in between. Before now he held roles of Lead Character Artist, Senior Artist and FX Artist for Sony, and Lead Technical Artist in a prior stint with Vicarious Visions/Activision. In all of these jobs, he got dirty in the trenches working on games that  built their engines, teams, and game designs from the ground up simultaneously.

Because of this, he knows firsthand that game projects demand a delicate balance of planning, experience, and resources to be worth the time, effort, talent, and money expended on them.

In 2007 he founded Emergent Behavior LLC and created Mrs. Riley, which is a website and application which helps people create visual learning materials for folks that need a hand communicating (infants, kids with Autism, folks with disabilities, etc).

Somewhere in 2009, he discovered Unity and built the Detonator Explosion framework for the Unity Summer of Code. He then spent a fair amount of time working with the swell folks at Infrared5 in Boston on such sweet Unity titles as Star Wars:Trench Run and Space Paranoids. He even helped craft some of the marketing materials for the ultra-suave Brassmonkey SDK which can easily allow projects to use iPhone and Android phones as controllers for desktop and console games.

In mid 2010, he rejoined Vicarious Visions as a Senior Technical Artist and has since taken a role as Game Director on an unannounced Nintendo 3DS title. Despite a return to the mainstream, he anims to stay active in the Unity community when he’s not hanging out with his family.