Alan Wilson

Alan Wilson, Vice President, Tripwire Interactive

Alan started his working career in the oil industry 25 years ago, moving later to the defence sector, culminating in 2 posts as a Managing Director within GEC-Marconi. This was followed by working for a number of major names in the finance sector, such as JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and New York.

Alan has been a military historian for 25 years, mixing that with game design over the same period. With a regular career in Information Technology, that included periods project managing major military solutions for current and future battlefield C3I concepts, Alan returned to the games industry with the new breed of WWII-themed FPS games. This started with bringing both military and project management expertise to a modification for Medal of Honor, called “The Russian Front”. This was followed by a shift to “Red Orchestra”, primarily to bring the historical expertise to bear.

When the team won the MSU contest, Alan supported the creation of Tripwire Interactive LLC along with the other key players in the original team. Alan worked on the design, budgeting and planning of the development of “Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45”, as well as focussing on raising the required funding for the company to develop the game completely independently.

With the development phase complete, Alan concentrated on generating the PR and marketing attention required for a major game launch, with the eventual result that the game achieved well over 120 reviews world-wide, scored in the top 10% on Metacritic for 2006 and has now sold over 400,000 units on PC worldwide.

Since then, Tripwire has gone on to launch the hit co-op zombie shooter, Killing Floor, which went to #1 in the Steam sales charts and has now announced the follow-up to Red Orchestra – “Heroes of Stalingrad”. Tripwire has pioneered selling games digitally, alongside traditional retail routes to market, with great success.

Alan has focused on the financial management and funding of the company, as well as the continued business development and PR over that time. Tripwire is now in its fifth year, with two hit PC titles delivered and a third on the way, fully-funded, profitable and completely independent – one of the very few developers to achieve this position.