Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley is an American video game designer and former agent with Creative Artists Agency representing video game creators.
Education
After entering Tufts University to study electrical engineering, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated in 1990, Summa cum Honore en Tesis. After college, he studied High Energy Physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, until the Superconducting Supercollider project was cancelled in 1993.
Career
As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. Blackley then went to work at Blue Sky Productions, later called Looking Glass Studios. In addition to his work on Ultima Underworld and System Shock, Blackley helped to create the sophisticated physics system in Flight Unlimited.
He is mentioned in the Flight Unlimited manual as follows:
Following the completion of Flight Unlimited in 1995, Blackley planned to use that game"s computational fluid dynamics (CFDs) code to create a combat flight simulator called Flight Combat.
However, a new manager at Looking Glass Studios demanded that Blackley instead design a direct sequel to Flight Unlimited. Blackley refused and was fired, leaving the company in late 1995.
As a result, the second and third games did not have quite as sophisticated physics (though still arguably better than other games of the time), and the series became more civilian in nature. After Looking Glass, Blackley worked at DreamWorks Interactive as executive producer of Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a physics-rich game published in 1998 (one of the most notorious failures in Personal Computer gaming history).
In February 1999, Blackley joined Microsoft.
Originally hired to work on DirectX, he co-wrote the initial Xbox proposal, and helped assemble the team that designed and built the device. He then promoted the Xbox to game developers around the world. Blackley left Microsoft in 2002 to co-found Capital Entertainment Group with former Microsoft co-worker Kevin Bachus after his time developing the Xbox.
CEG aimed to reform the financing models available in the game industry, following the Hollywood studio model, to provide more flexibility and creative control to game makers, and loosen the grip publishers had on control of the game industry.
CEG was unable to complete a game before folding in 2003. From 2003 through May 2011, Blackley represented video game developers at the Creative Artists Agency, evolving the position of video games within the entertainment industry.
The company is developing games for iOS devices.