NEIL YOUNG
VP and Executive in Charge of Production, Electronic Arts
Neil Young is currently leading development on The Lord of the Rings games based on the New Line Cinema license. The first game from the series, The Two Towers, has seen sales of over 4 million units worldwide and was one of the top 10 best-selling games of 2002. The second game, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, is set to release in early November 2003. British-born Young began is career in the interactive entertainment industry in 1988, when he was a programmer and producer at Imagitec, a small British development company. He joined the staff at Probe Software in 1990 as a senior producer, working on a wide variety of titles for Acclaim, Sega, Hudson, USGold and Virgin Interactive. Young moved to the United States in 1992, where he went to join Virgin Interactive, where he produced or executive produced Disney's Aladdin, Jungle Book, Toonstruck, 11th Hour, among many others. He was quickly promoted to Vice President for Product Development. In April of 1997, Young was named Vice President and General Manager of ORIGIN Systems, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts based in Austin, Texas. During this time, Young supervised the launch of the highly successful Ultima Online. In 1999, Young left ORIGIN to become Vice President and Executive in Charge of Production at Electronic Arts, where he founded Synthetic, an internal Studio creating next-generation products. With Synthetic, Neil was the creator and driving force behind Majestic, the first Internet-based interactive game that places players in the center of an unfolding conspiracy-thriller. Majestic blurred the line between fiction and reality by engaging players through non-traditional gaming mediums such as the telephone, email and fax.