UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL TUESDAY 6TH JUNE, 2PM BST
Former Disney VP Bill Roper &
GitHub’s Jason Jhonson Join
Improbable’s Leadership Team
Roper joins as Chief Creative Officer; Jhonson joins as Chief Marketing
Officer
London, 5 June 2017: Improbable, a British technology company specialising in
distributed computing and virtual world simulation, today announced that Bill Roper,
previously Vice President, Head of DI Central Creative with DCPI Labs (Disney
Consumer Products and Interactive Media) at The Walt Disney Company is joining
as Chief Creative Officer. Prior to Disney, Roper was a creative executive at Blizzard
Entertainment where he was instrumental in the launching of the Warcraft, StarCraft,
and Diablo franchises, as well as CEO of Flagship Studios and CCO of Cryptic
Studios.
Jason Jhonson, previously Senior Director of Developer and Product Marketing at
GitHub, will be joining as Chief Marketing Officer. At GitHub, Jhonson was
responsible for brand, product and developer marketing for a community of 22 million
software developers. Prior to GitHub, he occupied Senior Director roles in product
marketing at PayPal and Yahoo.
These are both new roles at Improbable, as the company builds its leadership team
after announcing in May 2017 that it had raised Series B investment of $502m led by
SoftBank..
As new Chief Creative Officer, Roper will play a key role in working with studios to
unlock the creative possibilities of Improbable’s cloud-based distributed computing
platform, SpatialOS, and the possibilities for new gameplay types enabled by the
massive, detailed, and persistent online worlds that can be built on SpatialOS.
As the new Chief Marketing Officer, Jhonson will be responsible for driving adoption
of SpatialOS, and building Improbable’s brand as the leading distributed computing
startup in the world, with a revolutionary offer to game developers.
Herman Narula, CEO and cofounder of Improbable comments: “Too often,
startup stories focus on the founders. We are building a world-class team at
Improbable. These two critical hires bring a wealth of experience and a record of
success with some of the biggest names in entertainment and technology. We’re
delighted to have them at Improbable, as we move into a new stage of our history.”
Bill Roper, Chief Creative Officer at Improbable, comments: "From building the
worlds of Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, to overseeing products based on Disney’s
rich intellectual properties, I’ve always focused on the opportunities created by new
technologies to design richer, deeper experiences. By enabling developers to
transcend the limits of traditional server-based gaming, SpatialOS and Improbable
are opening up new possibilities in game design. I’m greatly looking forward to
exploring this new potential with developers.”
Jason Jhonson, Chief Marketing Officer at Improbable, comments: “It’s hugely
exciting to be joining Improbable at this stage in its journey. The first games built on
SpatialOS are entering the market, and the recent investment has raised the
company’s profile. This is an opportunity to build a foundational developer platform,
which could transform games and many other applications.”
Bill Roper Bio:
Bill Roper has been a leading figure in the global gaming industry for 23 years. He
started at Blizzard Entertainment where his contributions were instrumental in the
success of the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo franchises.
After leaving Blizzard, Bill went on to co-found Flagship Studios (Hellgate: London)
as CEO and then served as CCO at Cryptic Studios. He joined Disney Interactive in
2011 as VP, Marvel Games and was promoted to VP/GM of the Core Games
business in January 2012 where he lead the Disney Infinity, Fantasia: Music
Evolved, and Partnerships development groups. In 2014, Roper assumed the role of
VP, Head of DI Central Creative and in May 2015, moved to DCPI Labs where he
applied his creative and business experience to exploring new ways to tell stories
with new technologies.
Jason Jhonson Bio:
Jason Jhonson joins Improbable with over 15 years experience leading marketing
and strategy for global technology leaders and consumer brands where he focused
on growth, global expansion, and business strategy while managing diverse highperformance teams.
Previously Jason was the Senior Director of Global Product Marketing at Yahoo
before joining PayPal as Head of Global Product Marketing in 2014. Since
December 2015 Jhonson had been the Head of Developer and Product Marketing at
GitHub, the world-leading version control and source code hosting repository.
- ENDS -
About Improbable
Headquartered in London, Improbable is a technology company dedicated to
building technology to enable powerful virtual worlds and simulations designed to
help solve previously intractable problems. In gaming and entertainment, this
enables the creation of richer, more immersive and persistent virtual worlds.
Founded in 2012, Improbable received $20m in Series A funding from Andreessen
Horowitz in March 2015. Horizons Ventures led a $30m follow-on Series A in July
2015, which included Temasek Holdings.
Improbable announced the launch of the SpatialOS Games Innovation Program in
partnership with Google Cloud in December 2016, and showed a slate of games in
development as part of that program at the Game Developers Conference in San
Francisco in March 2017, including Bossa Studios (Worlds Adrift), Spilt Milk Studios
(Lazarus), Klang Games (Seed), Entrada Interactive (Rebel Horizons), Ninpo
(Vanishing Stars) and Soulbound Studios (Chronicles of Elyria).
In May 2017 Improbable announced a $502m Series B funding round, led by
SoftBank. Andreessen Horowitz and Horizons Ventures also joined this round with
follow-on investments.
About SpatialOS
By building on SpatialOS, developers can use standard tools and game engines to
build new gaming experiences.
SpatialOS lets a developer exceed the limits of a single server or game engine. It
allows for a swarm of hundreds of game engines, running in the cloud, to cooperate
together to simulate a world much larger, richer, and with more players than any
single engine or server could.
A game developer can spend their time on what they want to do: creating and
growing their game world and its story, rather than building and maintaining server
infrastructure. Developers can create massive, ambitious games with far smaller
teams.
SpatialOS is currently in a free open beta for game developers – any developer interested in
exploring how they can use SpatialOS to create new realities can download the SDK at
http://spatialos.improbable.io