Bio & Contact

Bio

Ben Hoyt - Video Game Producer

Personal

I was born in Boston, MA to Donald and Gwendolyn Hoyt. At the age of 2, we moved to Upland, CA shortly after my brother Andy was born. My sister, Liz, was born 2 years later and we grew-up in Upland.

After I graduated from Upland High School I attended Pomona College, in Claremont, CA. After bouncing around between several different majors, I ultimately settled on Economics, in which i earned a BA. (In retrospect, however, I wish that I had majored in History and taken a few classes in computer science, as well). My real passion during school, however, was Parliamentary Debate, which I participated in for all 4 years.

Since college I have lived in Pasadena, CA; Chicago, IL; and Sherman Oaks, CA. Today, my passions include playing and developing video games, socializing with my many incredible friends, fine dining, soccer, fantasy football, scuba diving, spending time with family, and several television shows that I’m mildly addicted to (Lost, CSI, Survivor, and American Idol.  I’m also enjoying V and Flash Forward lately).

Professional

I was first exposed to the video game industry shortly after I graduated from college, when I was working at a small start-up middleware developer called Silver Platter Software. After Silver Platter went out of business in mid-2003, I decided that what I really wanted to do was create video games. Thanks to the help from some fantastic people that I had met in the industry, particularly Jill Zinner and Michael Steele, I received an offer to relocate from Southern California to Chicago in order to work as a Producer at High Voltage Software and I jumped at the opportunity.

I spent 2 years at High Voltage, where I managed the development of a children’s card-battling game called Duel Masters, (based on the Wizards of the Coast card game of the same name). Then, I joined EA Chicago as a Development Director, where I worked on Def Jam: Icon, until August, 2006. In late-2006 I returned to Southern California where I became the Producer in charge of creating product/tech demos for Emergent Game Technologies, makers of the Gamebryo game engine. I helped with the creation of the Emerge Demo for GDC 2007 and the Kinslayer Demo for GDC 2008, before departing the company.

I then worked at Paramount Pictures in their Digital Entertainment group, where I was the Sr. Producer helping manage the creation of games based off of Paramount’s many movie titles, including a game called Star Trek: D-A-C, in cooperation with Bad Robot Entertainment.  It was at Paramount that I began to learn about the film industry and begin to form my own ideas about Transmedia.  After Paramount I spent a brief, but very educational, stint at EA Mobile on contract as a Producer, where I learned a lot about social/casual games and the exploding mobile gaming market.  Currently, I am working at Atari as a Sr. Producer where I have had the good fortune of working on a fantastic game called The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, which recently shipped worldwide on the PC to critical acclaim and is scheduled to come to the Xbox 360 later this year.

Contact Info