Don Daglow is a three-time Inc. 500™ CEO, a pioneering game designer and 2008 Technical Emmy® Award recipient whose career spans the history of Silicon Valley. Teams have shipped over $1 billion in game products under his leadership.
In addition to working with publishers and game developers, Don serves as Sr. Director for Industry Relations at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY (home of the largest collection of video games and related documents and artifacts in the world), as an Advisor at the Founders Space accelerator in San Francisco (rated in the Top Ten by Inc. Magazine), and as the volunteer President of The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Foundation, the charitable wing of the Academy.
Daglow has delivered keynotes and speeches at The Smithsonian Art Museum in Washington D.C., BAFTA in London, the Biennale in Frankfurt, Medientage in Munich and many international games conferences.
He is the only executive in the history of the games industry who has held leadership and/or creative positions on every generation of video game consoles, from 1980 to the present day. In 2003 he received the CGE Award for "groundbreaking achievements that shaped the Video Game Industry."
Along with John Carmack of id Software and Mike Morhaime of Blizzard Entertainment, Daglow is one of only three game developers whose work has been honored at both the Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards and at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences DICE Awards.
As an engineer working on mainframe computers, Daglow also created key early milestones in the development of chatbots (ECALA, 1972) and the machine translation of natural language (Spanish Translator, 1977).
Don Daglow is the only games industry pioneer who is credited with creating seminal games in four different game genres:
• Role Playing – First DEC computer mainframe RPG (Dungeon, 1975, DEC PDP-10); first graphical MMORPG (Neverwinter Nights, 1991, Emmy® Award 2008)
• Sports – First interactive sports simulation game (Baseball, 1971); first use of multiple camera angles in video games (Intellivision World Series Baseball, 1983, with Eddie Dombower); produced two of the first three EA sports titles, designed one of them (World Tour Golf, Earl Weaver Baseball, 1984-87)
• Sim & God Games – First simulation video game, first "God" video game (Intellivision Utopia, 1981)
• Real-Time Strategy – First game with RTS gameplay (Intellivision Utopia, 1981); first 3D display in RTS games (Stronghold, 1993)
He is also an accomplished writer, with a playwriting award from The National Endowment for the Arts, published work in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and multiple book awards for his best-selling literary mystery novel, The Fog Seller and for the novelette The Last One on the Run. His non-fiction books are also award winners: Indie Games: From Dream to Delivery (for the games industry) and From Dream to Delivery for general business and anon-profit projects).
Don holds a B.A. (Playwriting) from Pomona College, and an M.Ed. (Multicultural Education) from Claremont Graduate University.