The Player

Scott Orr: Turns poli-sci education and predilection for electronic amusement into a career. Creates Madden Football, among other addictive electronic games. Now CEO and chief creative officer at Sorrent and facing a enw playing field: wireless gaming.

I played a lot of sports in high school and college, but I was more focused on my GPA than my batting average. When I got out of grad school I did some marketing for a new company that had big plans to sell personal electronics. I met a kid who knew how to program, and we created a version of Pac-Man that was compatible with the TI99 and Atari 400 systems. That was 1981.

My focus has always been on designing and producing. I equate it to being a writer and director in the movies. You need 15 to 20 people to create a game, and over the years I've been able to work with some of the best. At 46, I might be considered an old guy in this business, but I learned a lot back in the days when none of us really knew what we were doing and went by our instincts. When you're in your 20s, you just don't know better — you think something's a good idea, you go for it.

The secret to gaming is finding the right kind of user interface and the right kind of play balance. Madden Football wasn't the best-looking game, but it was the most fun to play. That experience has been invaluable to me in approaching the wireless market. My instincts tell me this is going to be the next great game platform. How quickly it develops is anybody's guess, but we're going to go for it. We've assembled a who's who of technologists, designers and producers who have been responsible for some of the biggest titles in the history of video games.

The cell phone is a device people use to connect to other people. So one of the fundamental aspects of all of our games is an ability to connect and compete head-to-head across the network. We have some innovations that we think will really move the genre forward, like something we call Mobile Persona. It allows you to create a digital character that gets better over time. We think it is the kind of thing that will establish these games as a legitimate new gaming platform.

The younger guys in the company are game fanatics. They're tougher to beat. So I stack the deck and play kids who are playing a game for the first time — after I've played it all through development. --As told to Tim McElligott