Paul Steed

A published author, Paul Steed wrote three books on modeling and animating game characters for 3D games. He served on the Advisory Board for GDC for many years and as creative director for Microsoft's Xbox and Atari he gained experience on the other side of the developer fence. He left Atari in 2006 to co-found Exigent with Garland Wong and Jesse Rapczak. As President and Chief Creative Officer at Exigent, a global game art company for next generation and casual games, Paul oversaw more than 100 artists in India and China while consulting with top developers and publishers. Lately he provided creative and managerial leadership for an unannounced UTV Ignition Entertainment project, but subsequently moved on to a series of casual and console projects.

Steed began his career with videogames in 1991 at Origin Systems, after answering a newspaper ad that said "Fantasy artist wanted". Starting as a game design sketcher, he moved up to art director then project director. Steed has indicated he "didn't touch a mouse until I was 27." He worked as an art director at Virgin Entertainment and a designer at Iguana entertainment as well. In 2000 after being fired from id Software he went to work for Wild Tangent making several dancing girl visualizers for Winamp and a third-person shooter called Betty Bad (an homage to Steed's favorite arcade game, Tempest).

Paul Howard Steed, Jr. (November 6, 1964 – August 11, 2012) was a video game modeller and artist. He worked for Origin Systems, Electronic Arts, id Software, Wild Tangent, Microsoft's Xbox, Atari, and Exigent. He created artwork or models for several prominent game series including Wing Commander and Quake. He was employed by id Software until he was fired in retaliation for conflict over the creation of Doom 3 (according to John Carmack).