Manifesto Games announced recently that Nathan Solomon has joined the company. He will serve as the company's President and help with business development, investor relations and building out e-commerce functionality.

"Nathan has strengths in areas where we've had a need," said Manifesto CEO Greg Costikyan. "He's been a friend and valued colleague for many years and an informal advisor to the company since we started. I think that we always had the idea of working with him in some capacity and we're all very excited that we now have him on board in an official capacity. Nathan has the ideas and abilities to help us reach the next step, and he's a great complement to the team, both professionally and personally."

Solomon co-founded GameFlood.com, which enables downloads of incremental third-party content into games. He was a fellow of the American Film Institute and also directed and produced commercials. Solomon then worked with national advertising agencies in senior roles such as Executive Producer and Chief Technologist. He was most recently Vice-President of Business Development at EB Games, where he worked on customer-facing opportunities with new technologies, which included mobile efforts, digital distribution, and a variety of cross-departmental initiatives.

"I've known Greg for many years and we've always talked about the great potential of indie games; now I'm very pleased to be working with him toward that potential. He has an incredible industry background, enormous developer cred, and it's an exciting time to be with the company," said Solomon. "We will be taking functionality and content to the next level over the next few months and Manifesto's focus on intellectually engaging content has the potential to reach well beyond a core gamer demographic, giving it a unique position."


The Advisory Board of the GC Developers Conference added a new member, Harald Riegler. He joins Alexander Fernandez of Streamline Studios, Don L. Daglow of Stormfront Studios and Bob Bates to help represent GCDC worldwide.

"Serving on the GCDC advisory board is an opportunity to give guidance and input on the issues and opportunities we currently face in the game industry," said Riegler. "Many things that I've learned at the conferences over the past 10-15 years have proven invaluable in Sproing's success and international position, and now it's time to let others benefit from this knowledge."

Riegler has been working in game development since the early '90s. He is currently the CEO of Sproing Media GmbH and a co-initiator of German GAME.

"[This is] the opportunity to give something back to the industry after being able to profit myself from GCDC for years," added Riegler. "I want to help make GCDC more interesting for developers. More presentations and workshops with a practical element could be useful in this respect."


Recently, advertising agency The Ant Farm announced that Lisa A. Riznikove and Rob Troy were promoted. They are both executive creative directors of The Ant Farm's Game Division.

Riznikove and Troy both founded Absinthe Pictures before joining the Ant Farm. Among the awards they have won includes an Emmy, 2001 Broadcast Design Association Gold, a Summit Creative Award, four 2001 "Telly" Bronze Awards and a 1998 "Promax Silver Medallion" Award.

Most recently, Riznikove and Troy worked on the launch of the worldwide campaign for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare from Infinity Ward and Activision. With over a million downloads, the trailer for the game has apparently "proved to be one of the most successful video game trailers ever shown online."


Microsoft this past week appointed Chris Early to the new role of General Manager for Games for Windows – Live. He was previously studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games. You can read more about it in our original story.

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