Bobby Stein

Bobby Stein is the writing team lead at ArenaNet, the Bellevue, Washington development studio of the Guild Wars series of online roleplaying games. His group is a subset of the design team, and is responsible for generating in-game dialogue, user interface text, and lore consistent with world design. He and his team are currently working on Guild Wars 2.

Bobby Stein started his game industry career as a freelance and contract writer for web publications. He has written articles for Xbox.com under the pseudonyms Jim W. Gettys and Franklin Beans in addition to his own name, first party Xbox games such as Conker: Live and Reloaded, Forza Motorsport, Perfect Dark Zero, and Kameo: Elements of Power, and various online and print marketing materials for Xbox 360. In between stints at Microsoft Game Studios, he wrote for Nintendo Power magazine (volumes 184-190) and wrote or contributed to the following Official Player's Guides: Pokémon Emerald, Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.

Trivia

• Bobby was an original contributor (PR and writing) to the Unreal-powered WWII mod Red Orchestra for approximately one year before the game went on to win the Epic/Nvidia $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal competition. Since then, the core team has gone commercial publishing the game via Valve's Steam download service as well as securing traditional publishing in Europe through Bold Games.

• From 1993 - 2000 he was the bass player / additional vocalist for the band Boss Jim Gettys. They recorded two full-length records, one EP, and various other CD and 7" compilations, and were signed to NYC indie label Childlike Records. They had two songs featured on the Discovery Channel show Outward Bound. The label has since folded and the owners founded Jigsaw Sound - a professional mastering studio in Manhattan with high profile music industry clients including Atlantic Records, TVT Records, Henry Rollins, and others. After the group disbanded, he joined longtime Hoboken, NJ indie-pop outfit bobfields through the release of their debut album Head So Full.