Harlan Brown

Studio Head / Creative Director

A Founder of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, Mr. Brown was responsible for the initial design of their first product, Stargate Worlds before moving on to new product development. In that role, Mr. Brown worked with such partners as NBC/Universal, Warner Brothers Interactive, Bass Pro Shops and Pinnacle.

Mr. Brown spent the previous 15 years as Producer, Project Manager, or Art Director on a variety of projects for Hollywood and the corporate world. He has worked mostly through his own company, Old Firehouse, Inc., or in direct association with other firms, as an independent contractor. For the last 6 years, Mr. Brown has been almost entirely occupied in the PC games industry, as an Art Director and Producer.

Some of Mr. Brown's Hollywood credits include the digital restoration project for the Jay Ward cartoon series, including Rocky & Bullwinkle, digital stereo reissues of The Stuntman, and Laserdisc and DVD special edition releases (including new original content) for such films as Alien, The Abyss, Rambling Rose, The Thing, The Sound of Music, Independence Day, etc.

He has produced special digital effects for projects including Muppets from Space, Battlestar Galactica, The Second Coming, and Star Trek The Motion Picture The Special Edition.

In addition to his Hollywood credits, Mr. Brown has also acted as producer, developer and manager for corporate projects for HP/Verifone and Corbin's Electric and many others.

Kathryn Dutchin

Producer

Kathryn brings a diverse background of experience to Dark Comet Games. Having started in Superstition Studios, Kathryn moved onto the Stargate Resistance team where she managed the production flow and tasking for the project. In addition Kathryn served as the public voice of the team answering interviews, hosting a Dev Diary and creating a Stargate Resistance Facebook community.

Kathryn previously spent seven successful years in the corporate incentives industry designing motivational programs for fortune 500 companies including Verizon, Toyota, Lexus, Sun Microsystems, and several others. In this position she led a strategic team to grow their area from $1.4 million to $8.8 million in 3 ½ years. As a Producer, Kathryn uses her knowledge of instilling loyalty, enthusiasm, and retention to shape both the development team experience and to grow a robust community base.

Previously Kathryn has worked in a wide range of areas including a historical tour guide, gallery staff, and providing technical assistance on HVAC systems for Honeywell International. She is versatile and ready to take on any challenge thrown at her.

Kathryn holds a degree in Studio Arts and a minor in Psychology from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. She also spent six months in Glasgow, Scotland at the Glasgow School of Art studying Product Design. She is an enthusiastic gamer who enjoys both the “pen and paper” genre and gallivanting across online worlds with her friends and family.

Todd Ellering

Director of Technology

Todd Ellering is one of the founders here at Firesky, serving during negotiations, licensing and development of the company as its Technology Director and Senior Engineer. Todd was involved in the original negotiations and building of the relationship with MGM.

Todd Ellering is President and founder of TAE Technologies, a computer, Internet, and consulting firm based in Gilbert, Arizona. Todd has been operating in that role for the last 10 years. In his more than 18 years in the industry, Todd has pioneered several Internet Service Providers, and helped manage several technology and support companies. Todd has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, and in print articles as an expert on computers and technology.

Todd has his own home arcade that rivals the arcades of the 80's and 90's. With close to 100 arcade and pinball machines, even Flynn would be jealous.

Jacob Johnson

Art Director

My name is Jake Johnson and I am the Senior Environment Artist at FireSky my life has been very interesting. I grew up all over the US…moving back and forth from state to state due to my mother’s job. I usually say that I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, because I was born in Hayward CA. I call Castro Valley CA home because it’s where we always seemed to end up.

I have always loved to draw and create from my imagination. Expressing my thoughts into art is how I communicated my feelings toward life, and others. I found my self loving comic books, not really for the stories or the super heroes, but for the art style. I loved looking at Superman comics and trying to draw the characters on my own. I really didn’t know how to construct a character from scratch, so I would always trace the pages, taping the book on a window and using the light passing through as a light table. I soon grew past the comical super hero stage and moved into more mature themed comic books. I loved Dark Horse and Chaos comics. My favorite was Alien and Evil Ernie. I grew into drawing realistic creatures pretty fast. I would go to the library and check out books on how to draw. I always loved watching scary movies; I would enjoy pressing pause to draw the creatures, sometimes mixing and matching parts to create my own interpretation.

Over the years I dabbed into many mediums of art; painting, photography, and sculpture. In High School, I was a shop nut. Always working on cars and building things with wood and metal. It wasn’t long before I discovered welding, and I loved it! Soon I began making things in the shop out of molten steel and casting small sculptures from sand molds. I got involved with an off campus program offered to juniors who were interested in learning a trade skill. Of course I choose welding! I wanted to become a sculptor, making the huge structures you sometimes see in front of office buildings and in parks. After two years of taking this welding course, and graduating top of my class, I was well on my way to becoming what I wanted to be. But that’s not how it turned out after all. I soon realized that I was not living up to my true potential. So I decided a week before High School graduation to move to Monterey CA. From there I dabbed into computers and graphic arts, finding myself creating little slogans and logos. I soon wanted to become a graphic artist. I was searching for a creative outlet for all of my ideas. And I thought that this would be a great way to communicate my ideas to the world. So I enrolled into ITT Technical Institute in Hayward CA, taking courses in Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as HTML editing programs.

It wasn’t before long that I realized that being a graphic artist was too limiting in creativity for me. I looked into other colleges and found an art school here in Phoenix AZ. The Art Institute is where I made my home. I enrolled in their Game Art and Design program, wanting to become a concept artist.

I spent the next year learning and studying art styles and techniques to become more like my inspiration at the time. I went through many phases of art. First I wanted to be a concept artist, but I soon found out that everyone I met at the school wanted to be one as well. So I got introduced into the 3D world by some guys I had met. And from there on the rest was history. I found an unlimited medium for my creativity. I started character modeling pretty fast, but something was still missing for me. Character modeling appeared not to be what I had in mind; I felt it was too static for me.

While in college I would play games on my computer; but not to play them through as fast as I could. I would always look at the environments and see how they were constructed and built. It was intriguing, and I was engrossed at the level of exploration that I could encounter. That’s it, I found my calling. I found my love for environment art half way through my college career. I was soon learning the Unreal editor and making levels and environments of my own. I was heavily involved in online forums, constantly showing my work to other professionals and seeking their creative input on my work. I actually think I learned more from doing tutorials on my own then I ever did attending classes in college. So I decided to just stop going…just kidding!

After college I got a job offer from Nintendo and moved to Austin Texas to work with Todd Keller and Andrew Jones on Metroid Prime 3, at Retro Studios. When I first started I was in awe of the talent there at the studio. I learned more in my time there then I ever did in college. After Metroid it was time for me to head out so I was told about the project that was in preproduction at the time at Firesky, and I was very interested. Soon after my inquiry I got a job offer from them and I loaded up my car and headed out. So now I’m here, and it’s been a blast. Working with Unreal3 has been amazing. It’s hard to explain, but no one can tell you what making a game is like until you have been there. A lot of hard work and long hours go into these art pieces. And I am very glad to be a part of this creative industry.

Conan Brink

Technical Director

Conan has been a sci-fi / fantasy / gaming fan all his life. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and got his first contract programming at 15. Before he was even out of college, Conan went to work for the Sierra Network specializing in graphics and interpreters before moving on to server customization. America Online bought out Conan’s division and he soon found himself transferred to Electronic Arts, then AOL Music.
In 2003, Conan got the chance to work on Ninth Domain ™ by Tektonic Studios, where he enjoyed the challenge of working on massively multiplayer game server architecture along with two other veterans of the Sierra Network.
Conan joined FireSky in 2005 to work on the Stargate: Worlds™ MMO RPG, where he has specialized primarily in server architecture and client optimization. He stepped into the role of Technical Director in early 2009.
In his few off-hours, Conan enjoys playing a variety of obscure games, singing, and teaching himself to play guitar and mandolin.

Gabriel Mughelli

Community Manager

I’m a pretty big game junkie. The first system I ever touched was the NES and it was pretty much over for me from then on. I’m the youngest of four siblings who are also addicted to video games so we spent endless hours and many nights running through Contra, Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Secret of Mana, and anything else we could get our hands on. I don’t think I could name any one game as my favorite since there are so many that I like, but I think Final Fantasy Tactics (not the GameBoy version) would come pretty close. I also enjoy watching movies. I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula, probably too young but I thought it was awesome. With the rest of my free time I read fantasy novels and practice guitar.

So now for my boring info! I was born in Texas but we moved to Charleston, South Carolina when I was about five so I did all my growing up there. I went to college at University of Richmond in Virginia where I majored in Communication. After that I lived in Atlanta for a year where I spent time as an intern for 680 The Fan Sports radio, Chima Steakhouse (Yum), and Guerilla Tactics Marketing (GTM). When the opportunity to work in video games presented itself I was borderline crazy with excitement and ready to move out here to Arizona. I’ve loved every second of working here with great people and learning new things every day.

See you in game :D

Daryl Wofford

Graphic Designer

aka Fringeworthy in Stargate Resistance. One of the founders of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

I was a Star Trek junkie at age 5, and a Star Wars addict at age 7, when the first movie came out. My favorite activity was drawing pictures and building models of space ships and playing with electronics kits, until I got my first Atari video game console in 1980. Computers took over, and in a few years, between junior high programming classes and dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons, I was coming home from school every day to play with my Commodore 64 all night. A few years later, I met Harlan Brown, and learned how to write screenplays, which were mostly Star Trek: The Next Generation fan fiction (although I will always say our episodes were superior to the ones that were produced.) Being complete Star Trek geeks, Harlan and I created a never-completed manuscript inspired by Warships of the US Navy, called Ships of Starfleet, where he wrote the articles and I drew the "photos." I must have made over a hundred pictures in over three years, which was a great diversion from life in the retail world, and sustained my geeky heart.

Already into the BBS scene in the early '90s, computers started to get really interesting by '94 when Doom and the World Wide Web started to catch on, and I discovered that I was very good at Photoshop. I was sick to death of running a cash register, so I taught myself to code HTML, and got a job doing it, specializing in the artistic side, because web pages were spectacularly ugly back then. Eventually, that led to other jobs doing Flash animation, graphic design, and building 3D models for video games. I even built a super-detailed 3D model of the classic USS Enterprise in my spare time that my 5-year-old self would have thought was totally excellent.

When I first heard about the TV series Stargate SG-1, I dismissed it, because I thought the movie was an bald insult to the audience's intelligence, and a TV series based on it could only be a stupid waste of time. But by about 2000, I clued into the show, and before too long it roused my inner geek. In 2001, while floating ideas for a video game project, myself, Harlan Brown, and Todd Ellering had a concept for an MMO based on Stargate SG-1, Stargate Worlds. We spent the next few years trying to figure out how to raise money to fund our idea, taking advantage of the extended time to refine our game design, and after we got it together, in 2005 we finally founded Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment to create the project. The rest is history (or Shakespearian drama), with more yet to be written.

I'm also the guy who made this website.

Jonathan Beffel

Level Designer

I was born in Naperville, Illinois where I lived for 11 years before my family moved to northern California. A few years after we moved to Santa Barbara where I attended San Marcos High School and would eventually meet my wife. Santa Barbara is an interesting town, they try to purposefully not be commercial so everything you see is unique and family run. Interestingly enough though, a lot of chain stores that started off as family run businesses have come from Santa Barbara. My family ended up moving from Santa Barbara to Arizona so we could live closer to more family.

Around this time is when I found out about Firesky. I was initially going to school for computer science and applied to Firesky to be a programmer. Through the application process I ended up meeting Mike Whiting who recommended that I go to the Art Institute of Phoenix (AIPX). From AIPX I met a lot of people and it eventually led to me getting a job at Firesky as a Technical World Builder and I have since been promoted to Level Designer.

My favorite video game would be the entire Legend of Zelda series. So far I have collected over 30 Zelda shirts and counting. I am also a huge fan of the Stargate shows and I make sure the games we work on stay true to Stargate Canon.

Mike Jones

Technical/Environmental Artist

Mike is an environment and technical artist for the studio, with some of his earlier work for the team in heavy rigging and animation as well as digging into the guts of both the Hero and Unreal engines. He has been in industry for two years, a fairly recent graduate from the Guildhall at SMU in 2007 with a Masters of Interactive Technology. Prior to that he was in the Air Force for three years, stationed at Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2001.

Currently playing 360 & PC as much as is humanly possible outside of work, but food and sleep seem to keep getting in the way.

Attila Laczko

Technical Animator

I am a Transylvanian immigrant and have lived in Tempe most of my life. I went to the Art Institute of Phoenix after high school and from there went on to work at Cinematix Studios for a short while before they moved to Korea. After that, I did websites and things for about 6 years and then did some CAD for a residential electrical contractor after which I would end up coming to FireSky.

To pass the time I enjoy watching T.V and was in a failed rock band for about a year. My favorite video game would be the Final Fantasy series and my favorite movie would be The Empire Strikes Back. Of all the Stargate series Atlantis is my favorite, and as far as the worst movie I have ever seen that would have to be Lost in Translation. I am illiterate so I don’t have any favorite books.

Here at Firesky I am responsible for implementing the character animations into the game.

Thuan Do

Character Artist

I grew up in Prescott Arizona where I spent most of my free time drawing, painting and reading comic books. My High School art teacher Mr. Murphy suggested I choose art as a career. So with his encouragement I attended the Art Institute of Phoenix.

I landed my first game job at Cinematix Studios with the help of my friends from AI. The first game I ever worked on was called Revenant as a multi player designer... it was fun times. After that, I went to Fox Animation Studios where I was lucky enough to do digital ink and paint for the film Titan A.E. After the closure of Fox Animation :( I got the chance to work for Rainbow Studios. While I was there I had the amazing opportunity to work on various television and video game projects. Some of the highlights were ATV Offroad Fury, Splashdown, Cars 360, Donner, and Britney’s Dance Beat =D ! I was part of the Animation division which was closed down shortly after Rainbow was acquired by THQ :( . I went to work at Realm Interactive on a game called Exarch which would later have its name changed to Dungeon Runners by the time it came out. I spent some more time at Rainbow for a while then came over to Firesky. So if you were able to follow all of that good job because I can barely follow it all myself :)

Here at FireSky I help with character work making things look pretty. My favorite games are Starcraft and Rockband, and I also enjoy watching TV and taking naps. The End.

Alex Seavey

Programmer

I was born in Rochester New York where I lived for about a year before my family moved to Maine where I spent the next 17 years. I then moved to Florida to attend school at Full Sail University where I majored in Game Development.

I work at FireSky as a programmer. My focus is primarily on gameplay features, weapons, user interface and getting the Unreal animation system to do what we want it to do. I also use a magic wand to put what designers and artists want into the game.

My favorite video game is Asheron’s Call which was my first MMOG and one of the reasons I decided to pursue a career in video games. Currently I’m playing several games and have found myself playing a lot of shooters recently including Left 4 Dead, Day of Defeat, and Call of Duty: World at War. Some of my favorite shows are House, Dexter, Criminal Minds, Deadwood, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, and Atlantis. I’ve also recently gotten back into tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy Battles where I’m working on my Orc and Goblin army.

Keaton VanAuken

Programmer

I was born in Iowa but raised in Arizona since I was three. I attended the University of Advancing Technology where I got my bachelors in software engineering. Beyond a great education, UAT led me to be involved with the creation of Dodgeball Source which took our three man team to GDC 2006 where our mod was a finalist in the IGF Best Half-Life 2 Mod competition.

In and out of work, games and computers are where my passion lies. When not working you’ll probably find me doing one of the following; trying out the latest video games, having fun at one of the local arcades, battling in tabletop games like Warhammer, reading up on new game tech, looking at benchmarks for computer hardware, or enjoying one of the old classics on XBLA/Virtual Arcade. Beyond that I have many hobbies. Martial arts has always been a big part of my life. Taekwondo is my most practiced style where I have over 10 years of experience but I’ve also had training in Brazilian Jujitsu, Kick Boxing, and Kenpo. Other hobbies include: enjoying good beer with friends, free running, going to the local hookah bars, rock climbing, driving cars/motorcycles, playing sports, and finding the best “That’s what she said!” moments.

I play a large variety of games spanning most genres. Recent favorites are Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2, Forza 3, Left 4 Dead, and the new Wallace and Gromit adventure games. The most influential games for me would be the Zelda series. In my opinion, their combination of story, action, and exploration while making it all fun played a huge part in influencing most games today. A good portion of my game time is spent playing rhythm games both at home and the arcade. I still spend a few hours each week on the DDR machines at the arcade where I recently beat Arrabbiata on Double Expert.

As a gameplay programmer I tend to focus on combat systems and weapons. I work closely with the artists and designers to make sure everything looks and acts like it’s supposed to.

Brian Berke

Software Engineer

Brian has always had a passion for game development since childhood when he picked up his first NES controller to play the original Super Mario Brothers. “I always used to get so frustrated that my father could beat the first level and I couldn’t. I was like five or six years old at the time and I remember playing it for hours until I could finally beat it.” That same determination followed Brian throughout his schooling and into college at the University of Arizona where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

Wanting to fulfill his dream of creating new worlds for gamers to explore, Brian took a position at FireSky as a Software Engineer in 2008 to manage the publishing and account infrastructure for Stargate Worlds. “I’m a big fan of the Stargate franchise, so getting an opportunity to work on both a massively multiplayer online game and the Stargate IP was a dream come true.” Since then, Brian has contributed to the success of Stargate: Resistance and Dark Comet Games having designed the game’s achievement system and working on Unreal scripting.

In his spare time, Brian enjoys serving his church and inspiring his generation to also follow their dreams. “All of my dreams and desires were placed in my heart by God, and He certainly has blessed them. I wouldn’t be where I am today without Him.”