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Kelly Sumner (born 29 April 1961), is currently a director of ArBa Developments, and investor and advisor at Reactional Music. Sumner has run two NASDAQ listed companies, and has 40 years experience in hardware and software.
Kelly Sumner began work in the industry as a trainee electronics engineer at Commodore in 1979. He progressed up the corporate ladder becoming managing director of Commodore in the UK. [1]
From hardware he moved into entertainment software, joining US based Nintendo and Sega publisher Gametek as European MD before becoming CEO. Sumner merged Gametek into the fledgling publisher Take Two shortly thereafter. [2] As CEO he took the company to annual sales of $1 billion, investing in the creation of amongst others, Rockstar Games, launching products such as Grand Theft Auto and delivering a four-fold increase in the share price. [3] [4]
After Take Two, Sumner became CEO of RedOctane fronting the commercial development of Guitar Hero, the video game that went on to become a $1 billion franchise. [5] He sold RedOctane to Activision in 2006 for $160 million. [6]
More recently Sumner has been investing in early stage tech companies. During this period he has been chairman of Intent Media, which was sold to Newbay Capital; [7] and Mediatonic (Fall Guys) which was sold to Synova Capital, [8] and a board director of the cloud CRM company, TPoint, which was sold to New York-based private equity company Aquiline Capital Partners. [9]
He is currently a director of ArBa Developments, and investor and advisor at Reactional Music.
Reactional is a rules-based music engine and delivery platform that connects the music and games industries commercially and creatively, allowing any music to be brought into a game and the entire game’s visuals, music and sound to react live to that music. Something that has not been possible before.
Reactional’s platform opens up a new era of music personalisation, in-game purchase and a faster and more efficient method to create and prototype music for games developers, increasing music choice and ease of use for everyone.
Sumner is also a former vice president of Chelsea Football Club. He resides in Weybridge, Surrey with his wife, Kirsteen.
Appeared as a contestant on the videogame show GamesMaster (Series 2 Episode 12). Winning the Golden Joystick by completing his challenge on The Humans on the Amiga.
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016.
Rockstar North Limited is a British video game development company and a studio of Rockstar Games based in Edinburgh. The company was founded as DMA Design in Dundee in 1987 by David Jones, soon hiring former classmates Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond. During its early years, DMA Design was backed by its publisher Psygnosis, primarily focusing on Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 games. During this time, they created successful shooters such as Menace, and Blood Money, but soon turned to platform games after the release of Lemmings in 1991, which was an international success and led to several sequels and spin-offs. After developing Unirally for Nintendo, DMA Design was set to become one of their main second-party developers, but this partnership ended after Nintendo's disapproval of Body Harvest.
Harmonix Music Systems, Inc., doing business as Harmonix, is an American video game developer company based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in May 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy. Harmonix is perhaps best known as being the developer of music video games series Dance Central and Rock Band, as well as being the original developer and creator of the Guitar Hero series before development moved to Neversoft and Vicarious Visions.
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International Karate +, stylized as IK+, is a fighting game written by Archer Maclean and published in 1987 by System 3 for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum. It is a successor to International Karate (1985). Activision published the Commodore 64 version in the US as Chop N' Drop.
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The Amiga is a family of home computers that were designed and sold by the Amiga Corporation from 1985 to 1994.
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