Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor. As one of the key actors in the formation of New Hollywood, Hoffman is known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and emotionally vulnerable characters. He is the recipient of numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Hoffman has received numerous honors including the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1997, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2012. Actor Robert De Niro described him as "an actor with the everyman's face who embodied the heartbreakingly human".
Louis Castle is an American video games designer. He is known for co-founding Westwood Studios, designing the PC game Blade Runner, and collaborating with Steven Spielberg on the Boom Blox and Boom Blox Bash Party video games for the Wii console based on Spielberg's design ideas.
Robert Bates is an American computer game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocom's dissolution in 1989, Bates co-founded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. Notable games that he has designed, written, or produced include Unreal II (2003), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Eric the Unready (1993), listed as Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World magazine and also included on the 1996 list of "150 best games of all time". In 1998 he wrote the award-winning game Quandaries for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design and development in works such as the 2001 book Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is commonly used as a game design textbook in college courses. From 2011–2014, Bates was Chief Creative Officer for External Studios at Zynga. He continues to work as an independent consultant with various publishers in the games industry.
Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 American computer-animated martial arts comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The first installment in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, it was directed by John Stevenson, in his feature directorial debut, co-directed by Mark Osborne and written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, from a story by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. The film stars the voices of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, James Hong, Dan Fogler, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Jackie Chan. The film, set in a version of ancient China populated by anthropomorphic animals, centers on a bumbling panda named Po (Black), a kung-fu enthusiast. When a notorious snow-leopard named Tai Lung (McShane) is foretold to escape at Chorh-Gom Prison, Po is unwittingly named the "Dragon Warrior"—a prophesied hero worthy of reading a scroll that has been intended to grant its reader limitless power.
Mike Perry was creative director at Maxis and Electronic Arts, where he worked on many of the Sim games. He produced and designed the award-winning title SimFarm, and both produced and programmed Yoot Saito's award-winning title SimTower. As of 2011, he is an executive producer at Zynga, managing the FarmVille game.
Master Ping Xiao Po or also known as in the franchise "Kung Fu Panda", is the title character and protagonist of the Kung Fu Panda franchise, primarily voiced by Jack Black and Mick Wingert. He is an anthropomorphic giant panda who is improbably chosen as the champion of the Valley of Peace in the first film. Po is the prophesied Dragon Warrior or Dragon Master, as well as the Warrior of Black and White.
Zynga Inc. is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
Kung Fu Panda 2 is a 2011 American computer-animated martial arts comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is the sequel to Kung Fu Panda (2008) and the second installment in the Kung Fu Panda franchise. It was directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson and written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. The film stars Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, James Hong, and Jackie Chan reprising their character roles from the first film, with Gary Oldman, Michelle Yeoh, Danny McBride, Dennis Haysbert, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Victor Garber voicing new characters. In the film, Po and his allies travel to Gongmen City to stop the evil peacock Lord Shen from conquering China, while also rediscovering Po's forgotten past.
Erik Bethke is a computer games developer.
Amy Hennig is an American video game director and script writer, formerly for the video game company Naughty Dog. She began her work in the industry on the Nintendo Entertainment System, with her design debut on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City. She later went to work for Crystal Dynamics, working primarily on the Legacy of Kain series. With Naughty Dog, she worked primarily on the Jak and Daxter and Uncharted series.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson is an American story artist, character designer, television director, illustrator, and film director. She is best known for directing the films Kung Fu Panda 2, Kung Fu Panda 3, and The Darkest Minds. Yuh is the first woman to solely direct and the first Asian American to direct a major American animated film, and has been recognized as a commercially successful Asian American director.
James Sie is an American actor and author. He was the voice of an animated Jackie Chan and several other characters in Jackie Chan Adventures, Master Monkey in Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, taking over for Chan, and Eddy Raja in the Uncharted series. His debut novel, Still Life Las Vegas, was published in August 2015.
Greg Johnson is an American video game designer who has worked for Binary Systems and Electronic Arts, was co-founder with Mark Voorsanger of ToeJam & Earl Productions Inc., and in 2006 founded his own company, HumaNature Studios. He is known for the iconic ToeJam & Earl series (1991–present), and his design credits additionally include Starflight (1986), Game of the Year Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula (1989), the multi-award-winning Orly's Draw-A-Story (1997), Kung Fu Panda World (2010), and Doki-Doki Universe (2013), Back in the Groove (2019),
Frank Lantz is the Director of the New York University Game Center. For over 12 years, Lantz taught game design at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology, and culture have appeared in a variety of publications. In 2012, The New York Times referred to Lantz as a "reigning genius of the mysteries of games" following his design of iPhone puzzle game Drop7.
Kung Fu Panda 3 is a 2016 computer-animated martial arts comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation, China Film Group Corporation, Oriental DreamWorks, and Zhong Ming You Ying Film, and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It is the third installment in the Kung Fu Panda franchise and the sequel to Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011). The film was directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Alessandro Carloni and written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger.
Alessandro Carloni is an Italian film director, animator, and art director, best known for his work with DreamWorks Animation in general, particularly the Kung Fu Panda films. He co-directed Kung Fu Panda 3, alongside Jennifer Yuh Nelson.
Since the 2010s, the video game company Electronic Arts has been at the center of numerous controversies involving acquisitions of companies and anti-consumer practices in their individual games, as well as lawsuits alleging anti-competitive practices on EA's part when signing sports-related contracts. In 2012 and 2013, the company was named "Worst Company in America" by Consumerist, while it was named the 5th most hated company in the United States by USA Today in 2018.
Mark Skaggs is an American video game producer and executive. Skaggs is known for leading the team that created the Facebook game FarmVille for Zynga, leading the team that created CityVille. He served as Executive Producer and product lead for the PC real-time strategy games Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth.
In the video game industry, crunch is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours. It is often used as a way to cut the costs of game development, a labour-intensive endeavour. However, it leads to negative health impacts for game developers and a decrease in the quality of their work, as well as driving people out of the industry temporarily or permanently. Critics of crunch note how it has become normalized within the game-development industry, to deleterious effects for all involved. A lack of unionization on the part of game developers has often been suggested as the reason crunch exists, and organizations such as Game Workers Unite aim to fight against crunch by forcing studios to honour developers' labor rights.
