One of the creators of the original Xbox game console from Microsoft is heading back to making games himself. According to a story in Variety, Seamus Blackley will be leaving his current post as the head of games at the Hollywood-based Creative Artists Agency in order to launch a new game development studio. The story adds that Blackley's departure from CAA won't be sudden; he will remain with the agency for much of 2011 in a transition period.
After starting his career as a physicist, Blackley first gained fame in game development when he worked at the now defunct Looking Glass Studios on games like Flight Unlimited (where he developed the flight sim's physics model), Ultima Underworld and the original System Shock. Later he was a executive producer at the now shut down Dreamworks Interactive on Jurassic Park Trespasser. Unfortunately the game, a highly ambitious first person action game set in the universe of the box office hit movies, received poor reviews when it was released in 1998.
Blackley then joined Microsoft and later helped to lead the team that came up with the original Xbox game console at the company. He was also one of the most public people on the Xbox team in terms of chatting with the press. In 2003, after an attempt to launch a game funding company called Capital Entertainment Group failed, Blakely joined CAA which represents a number of major game developers such as Irrational Games' Ken Levine, Insomniac Games and more recently Respawn Entertainment, formed by the two fired co-founders of Infinity Ward, the creators of the Call of Duty series.
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