Crisi Albertson

Crisi Albertson began her career, in the QA department, at SEGA in 1992. Determined to understand every aspect of production, she learned the process from the end, following the yarn until she reached the beginning. On her first day as a tester, she crashed Sonic the Hedgehog, which had been officially released only hours before. As luck would have it, the crash was reproducible, and Crisi was lucky enough to experience not only the importance of reproducing problems within the game, but what information the programmers need in order to ensure the problem is fixed such that the consumer has the best possible gaming experience.

Over the next 3 years, she worked as a tester, lead tester, as well as build management burning EPROMs for QA as well as bios chips for the new Saturn platform. Noticing the importance of existing standardization, and the department being burdened with massive resource fluctuation due to the seasonal nature of game testing, she created the QA training and orientation program, which is still in effect at Sega of America. The purpose of the program is to enable new hires to understand the role of QA and how to RAPIDLY become a successful tester, in order to keep up with the intense development needs of the growing industry without compromising existing quality standards.

After QA, Crisi (Emily) earned a position as an assistant producer. She was promoted twice within the first year, to associate producer, and then producer. In 1997, when Sega changed direction, she decided it was time to expand her understanding of technology and innovation by going to a start-up called ePlanet, whose mission was to develop vision based games and applications (a pre-cursor to eye-toy, wii, and kinect). In September of 1999, she successfully produced and launched the first ever vision-based game system for consumers, the Me2Cam (platform) with FunFair (vision game) published by IntelPlay (a partnership between Intel and Mattel).