Company Bios 
Founded in 1998, Flying Lab Software assembled a top notch team of game industry professionals with nearly a century of combined industry experience. Below you will find a list of principle individuals who bring Pirates of the Burning Sea to life.
Russell Williams CEO
Russell Williams was program manager for international best sellers Microsoft Exchange, the Microsoft Golf series, and of course, Rails Across America. Before that he worked on the very first Windows email program, DaVinci eMail. A devoted computer game fanatic, he is proud to contribute to the interactive entertainment community through his membership in the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, and has an extensive collection of games going all the way back to the Apple II.
John Tynes Producer
John Tynes is a writer, editor, and game designer. He is the founder of Pagan Publishing, which produced numerous books and magazines under license for the Call of Cthulhu table-top role-playing game. For twelve years he served Pagan as editor-in-chief, lead writer, and graphic designer, winning gaming’s prestigious Origins Award four times, including once for his horror-espionage novel Delta Green: The Rules of Engagement. He was the first story editor for the wildly popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering and has worked extensively as a freelance writer including computer game projects for Acclaim Entertainment and Bungie Studios. He is a columnist for the gaming publications The Escapist and X360 UK. Recently he wrote an original horror screenplay for producers Boaz Yakim and Eli Roth at Raw Nerve Productions.
Jess Lebow Content Director
Jess Lebow is a veteran storyteller whose writing has brought the worlds and stories of many games to life, including Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and many more. He spent four years as a book editor at Wizards of the Coast, supervising several lines of novels as well as writing movie treatments for the company’s game properties and working on strategy guides. For the last several years he has been the lead world designer on Guild Wars, a massively multiplayer online game published by NCsoft that sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year.
Paul Canniff Design Director/ Founder
Paul Canniff is a respected development manager on both large (50 – 100 people) and specialized teams for a diverse range of products, from network monitoring software to desktop publishing. He was Developer on Microsoft LAN Manager, Development Manager on Microsoft Publisher ‘98, and Lead Program Manager on Microsoft Exchange. He was the primary Game Designer for Rails Across America. He brings 20 years of programming and management experience to the team.
Kevin Maginn Designer
Kevin Maginn is a developer and scripter specializing in online media. He was a founding member of the internet department at AccuWeather, developing their initial web products. He developed a spam-handling database for Microsoft WebTV, coded the interface between the Lycos personalized portal page and an LDAP-based user directory system, and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator he maintained and extended the web interface to a Peoplesoft-based personnel and inventory management system. On Pirates of the Burning Sea, Kevin developed the user interface scripting code, the web-based online user content system, and our database-driven web site. His longtime interest in tabletop roleplaying game design has borne fruit as he moved into a design role on the project, creating our skill system and other character-centric features.
Joe Ludwig Development Director
Joe Ludwig spent three years at Hewlett-Packard where he worked on the TCP/IP stack in HP’s JetDirect line of network print servers. After leaving HP, he worked as a senior server programmer on the Middle Earth Online project at Sierra. Joe was responsible for the login, chat, and game servers and developed the seamless server handoff and player movement systems. Since joining Flying Lab in 1999, he developed the multiplayer and AI code for the award winning Rails Across America. As lead developer for Pirates of the Burning Sea, Joe designed and coded the entire server/client architecture and coded core game systems.
Heidi Gaertner Senior Developer
Heidi Gaertner has been a computer game developer since 1996. She started at FASA Studios in Chicago, where she coded the content editing tools and user interface system for the MechCommander games based on the popular Battletech franchise. When Microsoft bought FASA, Heidi became the lead developer for the Xbox Live Dashboard, the online component of Microsoft’s Xbox game console. She is Flying Lab’s graphics lead, developing the technology for the reflective, pixel-shaded ocean in Pirates of the Burning Sea.
Rick Saada Senior Developer/Founder
Rick was the solo developer of first Windows RPG game, Castle of the Winds. His previous Microsoft experience includes DOS Word, PM Word, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Money. He brings 17 years of programming experience to the team. Rick was single-handedly responsible for the automated routing system used in Rails Across America, as well as developing the normal mapping process for Delta Green.
Brady Houck Developer Lead
Brady spent five years at SmartRun Systems as a software engineer on a variety of projects, including the creation of device drivers for a video capture board and an advanced authoring file format. He joined the games industry and worked for Humongous Entertainment for four and a half years as a senior programmer on titles such as Backyard Baseball for the GameCube and Backyard Skateboarding for the PC, and served as lead programmer on Backyard Basketball for the PC. While at Humongous he spent a year in the systems group working on the core technology used in many of their titles. Brady was also the lead programmer on two Academy of Interactive Arts and Science Game of the Year winners, which were Backyard Baseball (5th Annual PC Family Game of the Year), and Backyard Skating (8th Annual Children’s Game of the Year).
Mike Byron Developer
Mike Byron is a veteran developer with more than two decades of experience. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he coded tools and utilities for business transaction processing systems, then spent four years at Adobe coding Illustrator for Windows and improving their character rendering technology. When Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer, Mike was there for five years coding all printing-related functions in the NeXT OS. He moved on to Microsoft for another five-year stint, this time developing new mapping technologies for the Encarta encyclopedia and MapPoint Office product. Since joining Flying Lab, Mike has coded Pirates of the Burning Sea’s social systems including grouping and guilds, as well as inventory management, player-to-player transactions, and Steam integration and authentication. His experience and insight are important assets to our dev team.
Bruce Sharp Art Director
Bruce is a veteran artist and illustrator whose work for publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Omni Magazine, and The Washington Post spans a twenty-year career. In addition to his long professional experience in traditional media, he entered the games industry ten years ago as an art director at Sierra On-Line and has since worked at BOSS Game Studios and Microsoft Game Studios. He’s also been a teacher for fourteen years at Seattle Art Institute in commercial illustration and 3-D modeling and animation. His thousands of students now populate the game studios of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, and his mastery of light, color, and shadow has graced titles such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, Zoo Tycoon, and the Xbox version of Counterstrike.
Marc Overney Animation Art Lead
A graduate of the renowned Sheridan College of Applied Arts & Design’s Classical Animation program, Marc has worked at studios such as Nelvana, Gray Matter Inc. , Disney Toronto, and Chuck Gammage. Starting in 2D animation in film and television, Marc made the transition over to 3D while at LucasArts, where he stayed for ten years, rising to the Lead Animator position. Marc is also an accomplished storyboard and concept artist. His game credits include Escape from Monkey Island, Star Wars Battlegrounds, Star Wars Rogue Squadron, Curse of Monkey Island and Star Wars Ep III Revenge of Sith.
Tom Tobey Senior Animator
After a degree in Graphic Design from Penn State, Tom went to the prestigious Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. Tom trained under former Disney animator Milt Neil, who worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Snow White and other assorted Disney classics. Tom worked in Feature Animation for Don Bluth Studios on A Troll in Central Park and Thumbelina and then transitioned to the game industry, where he worked on titles on the SNES, Genesis,Saturn, Playstation 1 and 2. Tom was one of the main animators on EverQuest starting with The Planes of Power Expansion. One of his most successful creations were the popular Frogloks for EQ and EQ2. Tom’s credits include EverQuest 2, EverQuest, Depths of Darkhollow, Dragons of Norrath, Omens of War, Gates of Discord, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, Legacy of Ykesha, Planes of Power, 102 Dalmations, Blasto, DieHard Arcade, Ooze, ComixZone, Home Improvement, and Goofy’s Hysterical Tour.
Jeff DuLong Technical Art Lead
Jeff DuLong is a seven-year veteran of 3-D graphic arts. At Electronic Arts his games included FIFA Soccer ‘99 for the Sony PlayStation and Need For Speed 3 for the PC. At Microsoft, he worked on the Xbox titles NFL Fever 2002, NFL Fever 2003, and NFL Fever 2004, and was lead environment artist for NHL Rivals 2004. On Pirates of the Burning Sea, Jeff models our on-land environments and is the technical art lead on our ship model processing.
Ken Osuna Character Art Lead
Ken worked on the character art for Arenanet’s Guild Wars, and modeling and texturing on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series. He has also worked on characters, environments, and UI for WildTangent, as well as 3D characters for Wizards of the Coast.
Michelle Williams – Director of Service
Michelle brings 10 years of experience in managing software testing, including testing client/server applications at Microsoft for the Development Studio products. She was liaison manager between Real Networks and Nokia, and has extensive experience in all aspects of testing, including localization testing and coordinating betas. She has written and executed manual and automated tests on platforms as diverse as high-end PCs and WAP-enabled cell phones.
Andrew Binder QA Lead
Andrew is an old time game veteran, starting with Dynamix back in 1994 where he worked on such titles as Trophy Bass Fishing 1 & 2, Frontpage Sports Football & Golf, Tribes 1 & 2, and Starsiege to name a few. He worked at both Vivendi and EA (Madden 2001) before finally settling at Microsoft, where he was the test lead from the beginning on the 5+ million unit selling Zoo Tycoon franchise, which had the lowest support costs per units sold of any PC game title released by Microsoft.
Raymond Wood Technical Mission Lead
Raymond was the founder and original designer for GarouMUSH, a World of Darkness online game he launched in 1993 that is still running today. For fifteen years he worked on a variety of MUDs and other pioneering online projects, and for four years he was a system administrator for the AltaVista search engine. As Technical Content Lead, Raymond supervises the implementation of mission and world content, designing new systems as needed and working directly with the developers on feature requests.
Jaclyn Shumate Sound Designer
Jaclyn Shumate is a musician, sound designer, and audio engineer whose most recent work prior to Flying Lab was for the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, where she designed sound for the Forbidden Planet exhibit. Jaclyn is frequently seen around town with a portable recorder, collecting sounds such as cat meows, lawn mowers, and laughter for future projects. Jaclyn also works as a session musician in Seattle, playing acoustic and electric violin (often composing her own parts) for music genres ranging from classical to heavy metal. An East Coast transplant, Jaclyn received her education at Barnard College and also studied at the Manhattan School of Music.
Troy Hewitt Director of Community Relations
Troy Hewitt has 7 years of game and game-related career experience, having begun his career as a News Manager and freelance writer for gaming news sites. He worked on The Matrix Online as the Community Manager before becoming the Live Events Lead, where he created live events within the game and managed a team of writers and ‘digital actors’ in the delivery of custom content to the players. As Director of Community Relations at Flying Lab Software, Troy serves as the first line of contact for fan relations, 3rd party sites, and convention presence as well as scheduling and oversight for all media requests related to staff interviews, article requests, and the creation and distribution of PotBS-related media.