Mike Kawahara

Mike Kawahara entered the video game industry in 1983. He has worked with many of the top publishers and developers such as Electronic Arts (as the first assistant producer ever hired at EA), the legendary text adventure publisher Infocom, and Eidos Interactive – publishers of Tomb Raider featuring Lara Croft. Mike has several hit products that have earned multi-millions of dollars and won several international awards. In addition to his video game experience, Mike has extensive experience with online gaming communities with industry pioneers such as The ImagiNation Network and Worlds Away. His business management experience includes P&L responsibilities, operational responsibility and management and supervision of team members.

Most recently, Mike has worked with Massively Multi-Player Game developers in Korea design, re-position their games for the U.S. market and has helped them develop compelling business models. His efforts have resulted in the Korean developer indy21 bring their game Nine Dragons to the U.S. with the video game publisher Acclaim.

Mike’s accomplishments include: managing a production department earning over $60 million in sales; successfully launching over 40 new products; launching 3 new online gaming products and launching a pioneering CD-ROM based interactive multimedia player for home, educational and business use, completing the transfer and sale of a pioneering online game service and creating it’s successful product line. His international experience includes working with game developers and publishers from the U.K., India, Brazil, France, China, Japan and Korea. Mike has also earned a reputation for managing the most difficult projects successfully to launch – saving several titles from the brink of disaster.

Professional Highlights

• 1983: began a career in video gaming as Assistant Developer at Strategic Simulations, Inc. producing several titles including SSI's first fantasy role-playing game, Questron, a pioneering action-adventure game, Gemstone Warrior and numerous strategy based games.

• 1985: hired as the industry’s first Assistant Producer at then start-up Electronic Arts producing several titles such as The Seven Cities of Gold by Dan Bunton and Starflight – the first game to sell more than 100K copies on the DOS platform.

• 1989: produced and launched the first graphical adventure games from Infocom, which was the pioneer in text-based adventures.

• 1991: managed 27 titles for a simultaneous launch for Commodore’s CDTV.

• 1992: produced “Cyber Park” an online game community, managing development teams creating fantasy role-playing, sports and adventure games for online play.

• 1993: lead the acquisition of the “Cyber Park” core technology team to The ImagiNation Network, developing card games, casino games and producing an award-winning role-playing game that tripled usership in only six weeks.

• 1995: produced the online world Worlds Away for Fujitsu Interactive.

• 1997: directed development of “Phin-Phin”, an interactive online product for children.

• 1999: lead Eidos Interactive’s entry into real-time online gaming with Revenant.

• 2003: lead Korean game developer indy 21's entrance into the US market with the massively multi-player online game Nine Dragons, localizing the game, leading the design and adding US-centric features. Mike’s efforts resulted in a US publishing agreement with Acclaim Entertainment.

• 2008: launched Warhammer: Mark of Chaos