Bob Bates began his career writing text adventures for Infocom in 1986.  Since then he has written, co-designed, produced, or made significant contributions to more than 50 videogames.  Titles he has worked on have won not only critical acclaim (74 industry awards and nominations, including two Adventure Game of the Year awards), but also financial success (over 6 million units sold, including a #1 game on the PC (Unreal2) and a #1 console game (Spider-Man3 for PS2 and Wii), as well as several Top 5 Facebook games, including FrontierVille, and Empires & Allies.

In 1989 Bob co-founded Legend Entertainment and served as its President until the company’s 1998 sale to GT Interactive, the company that would become Atari.  He continued as an Atari executive, Legend’s Studio Head, and as an active game designer/producer until the studio closed in January of 2004.  He worked for seven years as an independent game designer, writer, and producer. From 2010 to 2014 he worked at Zynga as Chief Creative Officer for External Studios, and later as Zynga’s first Design Fellow.  In January 2014 he returned to consulting and indie game development.

Bob is the twice-past Chairman of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).  A frequent speaker at worldwide industry conferences and events, he is also the co-founder and organizer of the Game Designer’s Workshop, an annual invitation-only conference attended by many of the top storytelling game designers in the business.  Bob is also on the advisory boards of the Game Design Degree Program at George Mason University and of Project Horseshoe, a game-designer think-tank.

Bob is the author of one of the industry’s bestselling books on game development, Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is used as a textbook by several colleges and universities.  He has lectured on game design at MIT, Columbia, George Washington University, and Carnegie Mellon, and he is also the editor of the Game Developers Market Guide from Premier Press.  In early 2007 he co-authored “When Worlds Collide” a 269-page report on the Serious Games Industry for a government think tank.

Bob’s most recent game, Thaumistry: In Charm’s Way, is a one-man indie-project released in October 2017.

Bob is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the IGDA, and was selected as the IGDA’s 2010 Person of the Year.