Our Leadership Team
Headed by industry veteran Scott Blackwood, Exploding Barrel has assembled a best-of-breed team with domain area expertise in game development, creative/art direction, platform development, analytics and strategy. Exploding Barrel's team of designers, artists, game developers and technologists have a long track record to delivering top-selling games to the market such as EA's Skate, Need for Speed, James Bond and several EA Sports franchises.
Scott Blackwood - President
15 yrs at EA, 16 AAA titles, created 2 new IPs, 2009 Edge-Online's Hot 100 Developer List
Scott has expertise in multiple genres across all platforms, managing teams of up to 150 and development budgets in excess of $20M. He has worked on 16 AAA titles which have received an average Metacritic rating of over 82 over the past 10 years. Scott most recently built a 140 person team from the ground up at EA BlackBox to create the award winning franchise: Skate. Scott prides himself on creating a cohesive culture within his teams. He has a proven track record of achieving AAA quality and has world-class creative and business "chops" to boot. This has given Scott a stellar reputation and fierce loyalty within the game development community, allowing him to attract the best and brightest talent in the industry.
Jeff Howell - Chief Technical Officer
10+ yrs at EA & Relic, pioneered system for in-game user created movies, 80+ career Metacritic.
Jeff has pushed the envelope in cutting edge technology initiatives across every major engineering discipline. Jeff has lead large engineering teams in ground-breaking projects that includes, but is not limited to: Complex squad and navigation AI systems in fully destructible environments; The architecture and implementation of Skate's patented online gameplay system; Pioneered the system for skate.Reel which allowed for user-generated movies within a game resulting in over 25 million uploads since its inception.
Wilson Tang - Chief Visual Officer
4 yrs at EA. 7 yrs at Industrial Light & Magic. Ex-Founder of Embassy VFX.
Wilson was Senior Art Director/Creative Director at EA Canada, overseeing the 50+ person art and rendering team on the AAA franchise: Need for Speed, as well as the development of new content and IP. As Visual Effects Art Director at George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, Wilson has worked with the biggest names in Hollywood. Film projects include: Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, Spielberg's A.I.:Artificial Intelligence, and Ang Lee's The Hulk. Wilson was also one of the original founders of The Embassy VFX in Vancouver, the CG studio who was responsible for District 9. He also directed commercials for Scion and NTT Japan.
Heather Price - General Manager
Heather's logged over 11 years of publishing and studio experience (at EA and Microsoft Game Studios respectively) that has spanned Advertising & Branding, Product Management & Marketing and most recently before rejoining Exploding Barrel Games, Business and Product Strategy. Heather's known for her high energy, creative approach to business and nurturing best in class teams and partnerships with a laser focus on quality and profitability.
Bill Kim - Lead Producer
Bill Kim has spent 12 years producing blockbuster console games at EA
and other studios. He has spent the last 3 years working on MMOs for
both Asian and Western Markets.
Bill's blended experience puts him in a unique position to be forward
looking and to uncover fresh design approaches and business models as
the international gaming market continues to change and evolve.
Amie King - Director of Operations
Amie started her career in video games with EA's Blackbox Studio, and is an active member of Vancouver's tight knit game developer community. Amie is passionate about facilitating the growth of high-performance development teams, as well as managing the complex production logistics that they require. She was part of the core team on the highly successful SKATE franchise, and has been wrangling game developer nerds ever since.
