Paul Weaver
Senior Director, UX, Austin, TX
Award-winning Creative Director / Studio Manager with over 20 years of video game experience
I have been working in the games industry since 1992, initially starting as a video game magazine tips writer, through to my first game development position, starting in Quality Assurance at Rare.
After being given the opportunity to become a Designer and Project Lead there and working on the Donkey Kong Country series of games, I moved to Acclaim Studios Cheltenham to learn about Project Management, rising to the position of Director of Development. In the four years there, I helped create some fantastic games, with my favorite title there being XG3: Extreme G Racing. I also produced the first ever Sega games to appear on non-Sega hardware with Crazy Taxi and 18 Wheeler.
In 2003, I got the opportunity to move to the United States and joined Ion Storm, successfully managing Thief: Deadly Shadows to a high-quality launch. When Ion Storm closed, I took the opportunity to learn about Serious Games and took a position at Breakaway Games, designing and producing two products: Free Dive, a medical project to test whether a virtual reality video game could assist with pain management, as well as 24 Blue, a full simulation of the launch sequence of planes on an Aircraft Carrier.
My stay at Breakaway was short however, as I was given the opportunity to join Visual Concepts in the Bay Area in 2006 and once again took on the role of Creative Director and Producer, shipping Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer on 5 platforms in just 15 months, with an initial team of only 15 developers.
At this point, I got the opportunity to partner up again with Warren Spector at Junction Point as the Director of Product Development for Disney Epic Mickey. Through a series of events that occurred during the production of that title, I eventually found myself taking on the role of Game Director for this very special game, successfully bringing it to launch in 2010. After my promotion to Studio Director at Disney I ended up in the position of also having to act as Executive Producer for Disney Epic Mickey 2, managing a total development team of over 800 people at 17 different studio locations around the world.
With the closure of Junction Point, I took the opportunity to learn more about both Mobile game development and Education by joining Rosetta Stone where I led the development of multiple award-winning, game-based learning applications across a range of platforms, with all of our applications for children being featured by Apple. In 2015 I got a new opportunity within the organization, to lead Rosetta Stone’s UX division; a group that supports all software being developed at the organization across Interaction, Visual and Content design, as well as User Research, Prototyping, Audio, Photography/Illustration and Localization.
As well as this, I took on the role of Product Owner, Manager and Creative Director for the re-design of Rosetta Stone's flagship mobile product, Learn Languages. Working again with internal and external teams, we delivered a beautiful update of this amazing application to market and I'm very much looking forward to public reaction to it!