A Brief History
Left Brain Games, Inc. originated from The BrainStorm Institute, LLC, founded in 1999, incorporated in 2004. Left Brain Games is an S type Corporation, founded by, and owned by Andrew Keplinger.
Andrew began his programming career in the mid 80's, programming games for, first the Radio Shack TRS-80 Level 3 computer, then later the Commodore 64. In 8th grade, he published his first game, Sno Cat, in Compute Gazzette Magazine. After Graduating High School, he attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, getting a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts in 1991. While at RIT, he made use of the available computer labs to become familiar with Macromind and Adobe multimedia tools. Some of these skills are still applied today in the development of Games.
In 1992 Andrew was hired by Joel Fried, of Pelican Software, out of Farmington Connecticut, as an artist. Within a year he was promoted to the parent company, Queue Incorporated, out of Fairfield CT, and quickly lead a new programming group, developing CD ROMs for education. Queue had a less than auspicious history, but proved to be a great environment for a programmer, with no formal training, to take on projects, experiment with new technologies, and get hired by a new company within a year.
This new company was called The Cute Company, and was actually run by the same Joel Fried who originally hired Andrew for Pelican Software. This company specialized in the new field of Edutainment, in its infancy. These games focused on younger children, exposing them to education in a more fun, and animated way. Within 2 years, The Cute Company was purchased by Davidson Software and changed its name to FunnyBone Interactive. Davidson was then purchased by Cendant, and finally Vivendi Universal.
Over this tumultuous time, Andrew was promoted to head programmer, and Chief Technical Officer, the programming staff expanded to 9 programmers, and, at its peak, 100+ total employees. In 1997-1998, when Cendant started reporting accounting problems, and stock options offered to senior staff became valueless, the company quickly started to stagnate. It was around this time that McGraw-Hill began hiring.
It was also at this time that the entire staff of Left Brain Games began working together. Every current employee of Left Brain Games also worked for FunnyBone Interactive. They are hand-picked based on their skills, their experience, and their consistent excellent performance.
In 1998, the future Left Brain Games team was hired by McGraw-Hill to help form a CD-ROM development unit. Although great efforts were made, and great products were produced, the economic downturn from 2000-2002 lead to the closing of the McGraw-Hill technology division in Connecticut.
The BrainStorm Institute was founded in 1999 to handle freelance projects, including games for Wonka.com, the Beatles website, demos for Vivendi Universal, and other assorted clients. As the workload of McGraw-Hill slowed to a trickle, outside projects became more demanding. By 2002, Andrew was subcontracting programmers and artists to complete these outside projects, and the cash flow was sufficient to go into business full time.
During that time, the company took on projects, hiring consultants as needed. As time progressed, the number of projects increased. During this time, McGraw-Hill's Farmington, CT branch was being closed down, but there remained some unfinished projects. Immediately upon closing down, The BrainStorm Institute took on a large project for McGraw-Hill. While completing that project, we received referrals for other projects, and began a series of projects for McGraw-Hill through In The House Media, and Wonka.com, American Girl, and Con Agra through The Intelligence Research Group out of California.
The Left Brain Games, Inc was founded in 2004, mostly to clarify finances, allow for some tax considerations, and allow for the possibility of external funding. In 2005 Left Brain Games took on its first full time employee, Greg Izzo. He has been personally responsible for bringing in an ongoing project, and working on smaller Advergaming projects, as needed. Greg also worked at Queue incorporated, making Left Brain Games, Inc. the fourth company that both Andrew and Greg have worked at together.
After the introduction of the new Left Brain Games web page, including a large gallery of existing games, the number of incoming projects increased to the point that additional programming and art staff was required. Each new acquisition was picked for skill and flexibility. Left Brain Games was originally a virtual company, so every member needed to be able to work on their own, to produce quality results, and communicate effectively. Since then we have moved into an office building in Canton, CT. Poetically, it is the former location of the FunnyBone Interactive offices.
Ferris S. Thomas is a Flash developer based out of Atlanta. He is our most experienced Flash developer, with skills in application development and video streaming technology.
Keith Laverty is a programmer with a game development history that goes back to the 80's, having run his own Shareware development company. Over the years he has proven himself again and again as a dedicated, detail oriented programmer. He was hired from Pharmedica Communications, and brings extensive experience with the pharmaceutical community.
The team has grown a great deal, with 14 full time developers and artists, and a steady supply of Virtual Worlds and smaller projects keeping us constantly busy.