Paul Terry

Paul Terry began his career in interactive entertainment more than twenty years ago by joining a small start-up game company called Flyghts of Fancie. During his two-year tenure there he worked as a programmer on three different original titles for the Apple II and Commodore 64. He developed a tool for cartoonist Gahan Wilson to use to create animated 2D monsters and other artwork for a first-person graphic adventure game. Paul was also one of the youngest speakers at the Ninth West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, giving a presentation on “Instruction-Generated Graphics.”

For the next five years Paul worked on a variety of software titles including the Apple IIGS version of Activision’s GBA Championship Basketball Two-On-Two, considered as the best version of the best basketball game of the time. He contributed as a programmer, artist and coordinator on three different “demo disk” projects at Apple Computer, including the CD-ROM Explorer Disc which was shipped with Apple’s very first CD-ROM drive for the Macintosh and Apple II computers.

At Interactive Network Inc. Paul spent five years designing and developing interactive television games and applications. These allowed paying customers to predict plays in live sports events like NFL football games, and answer questions or solve puzzles during game shows like “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.” Paul developed the game applications and also worked on live server production software. He was there when the company went public, and remained until the company shut down.

Paul came to The 3DO Company in 1995 specifically to build a baseball game franchise from the ground up. He was one of the core original designers of the High Heat Major League Baseball franchise. The first version, High Heat Baseball 1999, shipped on the PC and was critically acclaimed as the best-playing baseball game. Paul spent almost eight years on the High Heat franchise, and saw a total of sixteen (16) SKUs of this game ship on five major platforms (PC, Playstation, Playstation 2, XBox, and GameCube), including a PAL version, and a version localized for Japan. High Heat was praised for its game play, which was Paul’s focus, always being known as the best-playing, most realistic baseball game, and garnering several awards including “Sports Game of the Year” three years in a row. Paul performed a large variety of tasks, both as an engineering manager and as an individual contributor.

Paul joined Global VR to bring hit consumer market games like Need For Speed from Electronic Arts to the online coin-op arcade world.

Paul is currently at Electronic Arts, where he has applied his sports game expertise to the Tiger Woods PGA Tour franchise, shipping Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 on four platforms including XBox 360, and then Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 on XBox 360 and PS3. For Tiger 07 he invented a unique game mode called One Ball. Paul drove the Production group to design the 60 different ways to play golf in Tiger 07.

At EA’s Maxis studio he was a key contributor to the widely-anticipated Spore, which shipped in September 2008 for PC and Mac. After that he shipped Galactic Adventures, the first expansion pack for Spore. In 2013 he launched SimCity for PC, and soon after for Mac, after working on it for three and a half years.