Enjoy a virtual meeting with prolific game designer, author and CEO of Schell Games, Jesse Schell!
Over the past 20 years, Jesse Schell has grown Schell Games into the largest full-service educational and entertainment game development company in the United States. Schell Games develops original games such as the upcoming Among Us VR, the I Expect You To Die series of VR escape room experiences, and the scifi adventure Orion Trail--as well as collaborations with clients, spanning all platforms for players of all ages. Schell Games focuses on creating games for VR/AR and mobile, as well as location-based games and connected toys.
A Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, Schell has taught Building Virtual Worlds since 2006; this course was created by ETC co-founder and The Last Lecture author Randy Pausch, who recruited Schell to the CMU faculty in 2002. Schell is the author of the critically acclaimed The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, based on his design methodologies developed at the ETC. A second edition of this book was released in 2014 and a third edition in 2019.
Schell is a sought-after speaker on game design, best-known for his D.I.C.E. 2010 talk, "Beyond Facebook", which was adopted as a TED "Best of the Web" talk and has received more than a million views online. In 2015, Schell was honored with a Carnegie Science Award in the Entrepreneur category and was named one of Pittsburgh's 50 most powerful people by Tech 50. In 2016, Schell was named Tech 50 CEO of the year and received a Creator-of-the-Year award at the CREATE Festival for his work at the intersection of creativity and innovation. Schell Games' work has been honored at the Game Developers Choice Awards, Cinequest VR Awards, PlayStation VR Awards, SXSW Gaming Awards, D.I.C.E. Awards, Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, UploadVR, Serious Play Awards, Games for Change Festival, Augmented World Expo, International Mobile Gaming Awards, and more.
Schell Games is a fixture in the Pittsburgh community, frequently collaborating with Pittsburgh institutions such as UPMC, Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, and Fred Rogers Productions on its beloved Daniel Tiger games. Beyond Pittsburgh, Schell Games has collaborated with clients worldwide, including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, LEGO, the U.S. National Park Service, the Lionel Train Company, and Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks. Before founding Schell Games, Schell spent 7 years with Walt Disney Imagineering, working as a programmer, manager, designer and creative director on such projects as rides for theme parks like DisneyQuest and massively multiplayer online games like Toontown Online. He got his start in tech as a software engineer for IBM and Bell Communications Research.