Jason VandenBerghe

Jason Vandenberghe is a designer, technologist, writer, speaker, and director. He has been making AAA action/adventure games for going on thirteen years now. His first game gig was in 1996 (as a programmer on The X-Files Game), and he’s never looked back.

Jason has carved a career out of bringing excellence to challenging projects. He cut his teeth at Electronic Arts, spending six years making James Bond games: Agent Under Fire, Nightfire, Everything or Nothing (his first lead design role) and (briefly) From Russia With Love. For him, EA was a grand education in the best and worst of large-scale game production & development practices, and further projects like The Godfather and Lord of the Rings: The Third Age were proving grounds for testing these ideas under pressure.

Taking a chance to move to Activision in 2004, Jason then applied this experience to a wide scope of projects: X-Men: The Movie Game, the Call of Duty franchise, the Guitar Hero franchise, Spider-Man… At Activision, he confirmed to his own satisfaction that many of the difficulties experienced by large dev teams making AAA games are the same world-wide, and he began to develop a style and series of methods to resolve these common challenges.

In 2008, he was offered an opportunity he couldn’t refuse: to make 1st-person sword & gun play fun at Ubisoft Paris. So far, he’s been delighted that he took the offer.