Games - Scott Orr

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	Games - Scott Orr

Scott Orr is an American computer game and video game designer best known as the original lead designer on the first video game console versions of the best-selling game of all time in North America, Madden NFL Football
. In 2001 Wired magazine named Orr on its list of "gamemaking gods."

Although Orr is most often thought of for his work on Madden, his career in sports games spans over 20 years, and he also has a strong track record founding companies as an entrepreneur.

GameStar

In 1984 Orr founded GameStar, a game publisher speacializing in Commodore 64 sports games, and served as their lead designer. The company's titles included:

On Court Tennis (1984}
Championship Baseball (1984}
GFL Championship Football (1985) -- American Football
Star Rank Boxing (1985)
Gamestar Basketball Association (GBA) Championship Basketball - Two-on-Two (1986)
Star Rank Boxing II (1987)
Top Fuel Eliminator (1987)
Face Off! (1987)
Gamestar Championship Sports Pack (1987) -- Miscellaneous sports

Orr sold the company to Activision
in 1986. He spent the late 1980s working for Activision, and then consulting for various games companies.

The creation of Madden NFL

In 1989 EA producer Richard Hilleman
hired Orr to re-design John Madden Football, then a disappointing Apple II game, for the fast-growing Sega Genesis. Orr and Hilleman together developed the game that we still recognize today as Madden Football, the best-selling title in the history of games in North America. Orr focused, as he had at GameStar, on producing a great head-to-head 2-player game with an intuitive interface, and with responsive controls. Hilleman and Orr played each other continually, honing the design. When the game shipped it was almost immediately a major hit.

Orr joined EA full-time in 1991 after the success of Madden on the Genesis, and began a ten-year period of his career when he personally supervised the production of Madden Football. During this time he and his EA team also created the following EA Sports
hits, each of which was updated annually:

NHLPA Hockey

NCAA Football

Andretti Racing

NASCAR Racing (later called NASCAR Thunder)

Knockout Kings

He continued to work with Hilleman during much of this period, and both were promoted to senior management roles in EA product development.

During this time Orr also produced two educational titles for EA Kids, a division later renamed Creative Wonders:

Eagle Eye Mysteries

Eagle Eye Mysteries in London

Mobile Games

In 2000 Orr resigned from EA and subsequently founded cell phone game design company Sorrent, an abbreviation of Scott Orr Entertainment''. Control of the Madden and NASCAR titles went to the internal EA studio Tiburon Entertainment in Orlando, Florida. Tiburon has successfully built upon the Madden franchise traditions developed by Orr and Hilleman, and the game has remained one of the biggest hits in the industry each year.

After successfully guiding Sorrent through the initial stages of the mobile phone game industry, Orr left the company in 2004 and founded Big Dog Games. Sorrent's name was changed to Glu in 2005.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Scott Orr ]

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