Ed Byrne

Ed has been working professionally in games as a Designer since 1999, having previously spent two years as a graphic artist for a multimedia company. Currently lurking around the greater Seattle, WA area, here's his encapsulated career history:

Born in NY, NY but raised in Dublin, Ireland. Graduated from Trenton State College... now The College of New Jersey with a BFA in Illustration in 1997.

From 1999 - 2002 Ed was employed by Ubisoft's fledgling New York City studio and assigned as Lead Designer for an unreleased action title. After moving to the Montreal studio, he was part of the original conceptual team (comprising of five members of the Ubisoft New York studio) behind Splinter Cell, developing the story, characters, gameplay and creating the original drafts for all of the game's missions. He also led the level design team when the game was greenlit internally.

Ed left to return to the US shortly before Splinter Cell was released in 2002, where he helped ship Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for Amaze Entertainment's 'Knowwonder' studio. After that he worked on Prisoner of Azkaban as a senior level designer, and several other projects as lead designer (including an original kid's PC game which sadly never saw the green light and some nifty but unrealised PSP concepts.

While at Amaze, Ed wrote "Game Level Design", a book on the art and craft of creating game playspaces for Charles River Media which was published late 2004, and was the first genre-agnostic book to focus wholly on level design as a development role.

In late 2004, Ed joined Zipper Interactive as the lead designer on SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo for the PSP, which hit the shelves for holiday '05. He reprised the role in 2006 with the release of Fireteam Bravo 2. From 2007 through 2010 he was the studio Creative Director, working on both MAG and SOCOM 4.

In December 2010, Ed departed Zipper to pursue new opportunities, joining Uber Entertainment to help with the design of Monday Night Combat while helping roll out a brand new game studio, Imba Entertainment. At IMba he was the the creative director at developing his personal "dream project", Moon Breakers, a space combat shooter, which was very fun but not very successful.

After Imba, Ed spent two years at Disney Interactive working on social and mobile Marvel titles as a lead designer, before departing the game industry in 2014 to try and do some good in the world through developing online software in the mental health and addiction treatment world.