Don Daglow is President and Creative Director of Daglow Entertainment, LLC, a new online game development studio founded in 2010. The company's focus is on mobile and online games across all platforms.
He also serves as the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Foundation, the charitable organization organized by the AIAS to support the education of industry professionals, and the organizers of the Randy Pausch Scholarship and the Mark Beaumont Scholarship.
Don advises the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG), part of The Strong museum complex, on its collections and archives.
Don's career in game design began in 1971 (before Pong), and he has been designing online titles since 1987 (before the Internet). More details are below.
HONORS
Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering, 2008 -- Don's work was selected for an Emmy® honoring his creation of Neverwinter Nights. The first graphical Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in an era of text-based RPG's, Neverwinter blazed a trail for later MMO's including Ultima Online, Everquest and World of Warcraft.
Don is one of only three game designers or producers (with id Software's John Carmack and Blizzard's Mike Morhaime) to be selected for a Technical Emmy® and to accept an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Achievement Award.
CGE Award, 2003 -- Awarded for "groundbreaking achievements that shaped the Video Game Industry."
Smithsonian "Art of Video Games" Exhibit, 2012 -- Don's work on Utopia was featured in this exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of Art in Washington D.C., and he was a featured speaker at the Smithsonian's Gamefest event.
Video Game Hall of Fame -- Don's original game designs have earned Video Game Hall of Fame honors three times, and have won multiple Game of the Year and Sports Game of the Year awards.
Inc. 500 -- As CEO of Stormfront Studios, Don earned a position on the prestigious "Inc. 500" list of top-performing companies three times.
National Endowment for the Humanities "New Voices" Playwriting Competition -- Winner, 1975.
PROFESSIONAL HISTORY
Don Daglow is the only executive in the history of the industry to lead development teams on every generation of video game consoles, from the Intellivision to the era of the PS3, the 360 and the Wii. Electronic Games has called him "one of the best-known and respected producers in the history of the field,"
Prior to founding Daglow Entertainment, Don served as president and CEO of Stormfront Studios for twenty years, selling over 14,000,000 games and generating over $500,000,000 in retail and online game sales. Stormfront's best known titles include the Tony La Russa Baseball series; the first PC versions of the console hit Madden NFL Football; the original Neverwinter Nights online MMO for AOL; the creation (with Producer Scott Orr) of the NASCAR Racing franchise for EA Sports; and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, based on the film by Peter Jackson.
Earlier in his career Don served as Director of Intellivision Game Development for Mattel, as a Producer at a small start-up called Electronic Arts and as head of the Entertainment and Education division at Broderbund. At EA he produced two of the first three EA sports titles. At Broderbund he led the acquisition of rights for the original Sim City, and exec produced the original Prince of Persia, Star Wars and the Carmen Sandiego series.
Don designed and programmed the first-ever interactive computer baseball game and first interactive sports simulation in 1971 (now recorded in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown), the first mainframe computer role-playing game ("Dungeon" for PDP-10 mainframes, 1975), the first commercial sim game (Intellivision Utopia, 1981) and the first game to use multiple camera angles (Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball, 1983). He co-designed Computer Game Hall of Fame title Earl Weaver Baseball (1987, with Eddie Dombrower) as well as the original Neverwinter Nights for AOL (1991-97).
Don serves as the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Foundation, the charitable organization organized by the AIAS. He twice was elected to the Board of Directors of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, serving from 2003 through 2011 before assuming the role of AIAS Foundation president. He serves on the selection committee for the AIAS Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund, on the Advisory Board for GDC Europe, and as Collections Advisor for the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.
Don also is a past winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities "New Voices" playwriting competition, and has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
He speaks extensively around the world on the topics of game design, online and social media games, and the video games industry, and has delivered keynote addresses for major game and media conferences in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States.
He has also spoken at events for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in London, and at the Smithsonian Museum of Art, where his work is also featured in the Museum's 2012 Art of Games exhibit.
Don holds a BA in English (Playwriting) from Pomona College and an Ed.M. from Claremont Graduate University.
A list of the games on which Don has worked from 1971 to 2012 is also available.
PUBLICATIONS
Don has written pieces for a variety of industry publications, as well as content for Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, edited by John Thorn, Pete Palmer and the late (and sorely missed) Michael Gershman.
His interactive work has been covered extensively in many games industry textbooks, as well as in The Art of Video Games, by Chris Melissinos and Patrick O'Rourke, Replay: The History of Video Games, by Tristan Donovan Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast), Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, The Golden Age of Video Games: The Birth of a Multibillion Dollar Industry by Roberto Dillon, Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by Edward J. Rielly, and in Game Generations by Frank Magdans.
His work as a fiction author is also documented in There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture, by Domino Renee Perez.
