Michael D. Moore

Michael D. Moore began work in the games industry at the now-defunct Engineering Animation, Inc. in 1998. The first game title he worked on was Trans Am Racing, '68 - '72, a racing game set in the era of late-60's muscle cars. The project was cancelled prior to alpha, due to internal financial problems at GT Interactive (which eventually led to its collapse). The abrupt cancellation served as Michael's first dose of the game-industry's great woe. According to Michael: "Trans Am will always have a special place in my heart. Seeing it cancelled so arbitrarily was a real reality moment for me."

After that, he worked on Small Soldiers and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah where EAI had a smaller games branch. It turned out to be a lucky move, because not more than a few months after the transfer, EAI closed down their games division. At the time of the closing, he was working on the fishing game "Championship Bass 2000" for Electronic Arts. Due to his involvement in this project, he was among the last group of game developers to leave the company. After the project was completed, Michael contracted with EA to provide additional support work on the title. This led to interviews with EA's Seattle office and Microsoft, which at the time was hiring aggressively to support their launch of the XBox.

The call of the MMP Asheron's Call led Michael to Microsoft, due to his intense interest in the genre. He remained at MS for five years, working first on an internal Gamespy replacement used in several games such as Dungeon Siege, Mechwarrior, and Asheron's Call II.

Eventually, Mr. Moore moved directly onto the internal MMP project that Microsoft was developing, entitled "Mythica". As Michael tells it: "Politics turned ugly after Ed Fries left MS, and the project was abruptly cancelled by the new management. I'm not bitter!" For about another year, he remained at MS working as a lead developer in MS publishing, serving as developer liaison for MS on the Dungeon Siege II and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes projects. As a "dev lead" for MS on those titles, Michael provided extra developer support and expertise to the game development teams, in addition to evaluating the programming schedules they provided.

Eventually Michael became convinced that MGS was rapidly eradicating its internal game development, with only the big-name studios like Bungie, Rare, and a few local internal groups still developing internal titles.

Around March, 2005, Michael decided to return to direct game development and began work at Snowblind Studios. His stated reason for choosing Snowblind: "I had played the Champions of Norrath console series a great deal after the Mythica breakup, and it granted me much solace." Now he was working directly with the talented team that produced those hits.

Michael remains employed at Snowblind at the time of this writing, currently working on the studio's next big project (as yet unannounced) and the soon-to-be-released console game, "Justice League Heroes".