- Team Archive - Game Circus

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Marty Wagner

Studio Design Director

Marty Wagner dreams nightly of core loops. He sees the world through metasystems and mechanics, obsesses over UI pixels, and expresses love through spreadsheets, much to the confusion of his loved ones. Most of all, he loves games and designing them. Whether they be video games, card games, drinking games, sports, or Virtual Boy, he can’t get enough.

Since joining Game Circus in 2015, Marty has worked to translate that love into making the best mobile games possible. He has led, from concept to completion, the design of numerous new intellectual properties across a variety of genres, and has contributed to multiple top-grossing games, including the innovative idler “Taps to Riches.” He’s also been known to dunk a co-worker or two with Dr. Mario.

Donnie Thompson

Chief Executive Officer

Donnie earned his stripes at Ensemble Studios, Bonfire Studios and most recently, Zynga. He was hired out of college as a high-level “Age of Empires” player by Ensemble, and Donnie’s obsession with systems and balance eventually lead to a systems design position. There, he helped  build “Halo Wars.” After Ensemble closed its doors, Donnie joined Bonfire Studios, working on several titles, including “We Farm.” After Bonfire’s acquisition by Zynga, Donnie worked on “Castleville” from concept to completion, and eventually helped lead the team, setting record user and revenue numbers.

After joining the Game Circus team, Donnie helped to focus the culture on higher-quality development practices. Five months after being hired on, he helped spearhead the release of “4 Pics 1 Song,” which quickly became the #1 App in the US iTunes store, with over 10 million downloads.

Jon Dean

Chief Operating Officer

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Jon’s career in video games began. He has boldly gone on a mission to save the universe from bad games and battling poor development process, taking on noble roles including Vice-President at Electronic Arts where he was Executive Producer for many hit games for EA and EA SPORTS. Jon was also a General Manager of two EA studios and VP of Product Development at Midway Games. He has produced more than 250 video games across all major platforms, including console, mobile, handheld, PC, and Facebook.

Jon is an investor and co-founder of an innovative sensory VR content and technology company, Spark XR. He is also a co-founder of a non-profit trade organization and sits on several films, university, and video game advisory boards.

Jon’s only needs for survival are tea and Twix. He always wanted to join the circus and says, “At last I have reached my destiny… Game Circus!”. He can be seen performing daily.

Rich Albon

Art Director

Having departed high school some twenty-six years ago, Rich enjoyed a year or so of portfolio work and general bone-idleness. It was a good time. Ushered by parents with good intentions, he was ‘encouraged’ to get a job that would get him out of the family home. After a few months of applications to the few games companies that existed in the UK in the mid 1990s, Rich was hired as a concept artist at his first studio on an odd Nintendo first party game called ‘Glover’. Twenty-years later, having worked as concept, senior concept, lead artist, production designer, art director and studio art director, Rich is now Game Circus’ art director.

Since 1995, Rich has worked across three continents (Europe, Australasia (twice) and North America (twice), from art director of BioShock 2, XCom, Elite: Dangerous (in pre-vis), Roller Coaster Tycoon, Crash Bandicoot and a handful of mobile titles to production designer/matte painter on Iron Maiden’s music video ‘The Final Frontier’, BBC TV shows like Spooks, Outcasts and multiple science documentaries, to art director on two children’s animated TV pilots (Neverspace and Forrester 5), he has been fortunate to have worked on exciting projects with great people. The long and the short of it is: likes art, likes art direction and does it as a job.

He loves gaming too and to be honest, if he couldn’t work in the video game industry, having no other career skills, he would serve no function in society. He is also quite, quite English.