Joby Otero was born in Burbank, California in 1970. He has has been drawing and painting since he was 4 or 5. He has been working on games since he was a little kid of 10 or so, and started programming and making art on the early home computers like the TI994a, Atari 400, and Commodore 64. He tried to mimic the great games of those days, like Missile Command and Karate Champ, and the results were terrible, but he learned a lot.

In January 1990 he started his professional career at Cyberdreams and his first game was called Evolver. That didn’t get published, but his next game - Dark Seed - did. He also worked on Dark Seed Amiga and CyberRace. He stayed at Cyberdreams until April 1992.

After Cyberdreams he worked for various companies and contributed to more than a dozen games (though not all released), including the highly-rated Sacrifice game, for which he was nominated in the Game Developer Choice awards in 2001. He worked for NovaLogic as Sr. 3D Artist/Animator (1992-1994), Neversoft Entertainment as Partner/Co-Art Director (1994-1997), and Shiny Entertainment as Art Director/Co-Project Lead (1997-2001).

Otero went to Luxoflux in March 2001 as Art Director/Project Lead, became Creative Director in 2005 and Chief Creative Officer in 2007. Currently he co-manages the Luxoflux studio for Activision (2008).