Tony Parks

Born in Belize, Central America, Anthony “Tony” Parks is a graduate of the Belize Technical College and Rutgers University, New Jersey (with High Honors). Tony started his career as a Mathematics teacher at St. Michaels College in Belize and later also taught at Belize Technical College before immigrating to the United States.

Tony was a software development trailblazer starting from the days of binary coding without operating systems. During a technology career that spanned more than 35 years he coded, designed, implemented and launched products that ranged from consumer targeted to enterprises. He led development teams, groups of teams as well as entire organizations.

Prior to entering the software entertainment industry he played key roles in companies that produced number one selling products in their industries. He was the software team leader of the Comp Set, the first large screen photo-composition system in the world. A photo-disc from that system is on display in the museum of science in London.

He entered the digital entertainment industry by joining MicroProse in Hunt Valley, then the premier military flight games company in the world. Starting as head of the software programmers, when he left MicroProse he was running several studios including Hunt Valley.

In 1996 Tony left MicroProse, a company that targeted hard core gamers, to join Hasbro Interactive, which targeted the mass market. After Hasbro Interactive was acquired by Infogrames in 2001, he left to help found Call-it Entertainment, a company with a mission to create, develop, market and distribute mobile wireless entertainment content for the global mass-market sector.

Tony’s significant accomplishments include: - First Black-American member of the Board of Trustees, Salem Hospital, Salem Massachusetts. - Provided development leadership in growing Hasbro Interactive from scratch to a top five (5) publisher in five (5) years releasing several #1 selling video games titles. - Was early industry contributor to the designing, coding and releasing to market of software and firmware composition programs for all the western European languages, the major eastern European languages, most Indian languages (from Hindi to Urdu), Aramaic (the language of Christ), Farsi (Iranian) and Arabic. - Was member of development team that was among the first commercial houses in the world to use UNIX, "C" and source code control methodology. - Programmed industry's first microcomputers. One of the first micro-code software and firmware programmers in the world. - Member of US Army experimental team, which pioneered the transition of payroll generation from manual to automatic systems. - Was one of the first persons from Belize awarded a United States Government scholarship. - Became a high school mathematics teacher as a teenager in Belize.

Tony raised four very successful children and is now happily retired with his wife Betty in their dream house on Belize Lane in Merritt Island, Florida.