Dàmiàn Isla

Dàmiàn Isla is the Director of Technology at Moonshot Games, a company he co-founded and launched in October 2009.

Before Moonshot, Damián was AI and Gameplay Engineering Lead at Bungie Studios, where he was responsible for the AI for the popular first-person shooters Halo 2 and Halo 3. In his seven years at Bungie, he worked on many aspects of the vaunted "Halo sandbox", making key contributions to Halo's animation and character-physics tech. He was also a contributor to Halo's story development process.

A leading expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence for Games, Damián has spoken on games, AI and character technology at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), at the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), and at Siggraph, among many other academic and industry venues, and is a frequent speaker at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Before joining the industry, Damián earned a Masters Degree at the M.I.T. Media Lab, where he did research on learning and behavior for synthetic characters. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science, also from M.I.T. It was there that, many years ago, he met a kindred spirit in a young Rob Stokes, whom he would later co-found Moonshot Games with.

Damián is a history buff and an amateur playwright, and is a great lover of plays in which people are mean to one another.

Company history* Microsoft: Summer Intern (1998 - 1999) * Bungie Studios: AI Lead (February 2002 - November 2008) * Naimad Games: Founder (November 2008 - July 2009) * Moonshot Games: Director of Technology (July 2009 - November 2012) * Moonshot Games: President (January 2011 - September 2014) * The Molasses Flood: Founder / Engineer (since October 2014)