Seamus Blackley

Ever the polymath, Seamus played Jazz piano at bars, worked on the search for the Top Quark at Fermilab, & wrote some of the earliest physics and rendering systems for 3D games. The success of these games eventually led to being one of the first employees of Dreamworks SKG, where his epic open world Jurassic Park game shipped before it was finished and was instead an epic disaster. He got a job offer from BillG so he went and hid out at Microsoft. There, in response to Sony's Playstation2 hype, Seamus wrote a proposal for a killer console system based on DirectX, then led the development of the project and is popularly referred to as the “father of the XBox.”

Seamus subsequently started one of the first investment funds to support development of novel AAA games, which was absorbed into CAA where he built a business to quietly fund and manage many of the best game developers in the world. Currently, writes books, studies Arabic, and serves as the CEO of a stealth deeptech startup.