Joel Breton

Joel Maximilian Breton (born 1971) is an international video game producer, video game designer, professor of game design, D.J. and entrepreneur. Joel is also known as an international super producer and he is best known for producing award winning video games including Bomberman Live, Unreal, Duke Nukem, Potty Racers, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Breton is also a professor of social game design at The Games Academy, where he teaches courses that focus on the key topics of compulsion loops, free-to-play game monetization, and social game virality.

Breton is a video game industry veteran who began his career in 1993 when he produced the Mortal Kombat World Championship at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Since then he has produced, designed and created more than 30 video games across 22 console platforms. He has also created more than 100 online games that have been played billions of times at AddictingGames and across the web.

Joel's first role as a video game producer was for GT Interactive, where he produced Duke Nukem, Anno 1602, Unreal, the original Unreal Engine, and Doom, along with several other video games. While at GT, Breton successfully green-lit and launched the development cycle for No One Lives Forever until the game was passed on to Fox Interactive when GT was sold to Infogrames in 1999.

Breton produced several games for Bethesda Softworks, a game publisher based in Bethesda, Maryland. He produced Sea Dogs, Echelon, and IHRA Drag Racing, while serving as Producer and Studio Head of Bethesda West Studios in Olympia, Washington.

Joel then moved to Moscow, Russia, to create and manage Bethesda's European development operations. While stationed in Moscow, he produced Pirates of the Caribbean for the Xbox which was the first U.S. console game developed in Russia. During his time in Moscow, Joel wrote a string of blog entries under the pseudonym fat cosmonaut detailing his adventures directing Russian game development in Moscow.

Breton founded the game development company Kozmo Games to develop casual games for the global market. Kozmo Games has since developed and released Ice Cream Tycoon and War Chess for the casual game market.

Breton returned to California in 2005 where he joined Take Two Interactive and produced World Poker Tour for the PS2, PlayStation Portable, Xbox, and Game Boy Advance platforms. He also produced Amped 3, a launch title for the Xbox 360. He led the Major League Baseball 2K6 team and produced the PlayStation Portable version of the exclusive Major League Baseball game which was released in Spring of 2006.

Joel began working as a Senior Producer with Hudson Entertainment in 2006 and produced Bomberman Live among several other console titles for the U.S. division of Hudson Soft.

From 2007 until 2010 Joel held the position of Director of Content for AddictingGames.com, MTV Network's leading website with more than 30 million monthly visitors. During that time he established the site as an original game IP factory, creating and launching more than 100 original game franchises and publishing more than 800 new games on the site.

Joel is a frequent speaker at game industry conventions and he represented MTV Networks and AddictingGames by speaking at the Casual Connect conference in Kiev in 2008. Joel was a speaker and on the steering committee for the Flash Gaming Summit in 2009, at Casual Connect Seattle 2010, and Flash Gaming Summit 2010.

Breton also pioneered the production of viral news games and he designed and created more than 10 viral news games that were each played millions of times. Hero On The Hudson was one of the first viral news games he launched, celebrating the heroism of Captain Sully Sulenburger's perfect plane landing on the Hudson river. Oiligarchy, was another viral news game which examined the oil industry for the first time in a video game. Joel and his team at AddictingGames also produced Where's the Naughty Governor, a news game that was highlighted by the LA Times in the article "Web games, ripped from the healdines".

In August 2010, Joel was appointed Executive Vice President of North America for Zattikka Ltd., a social game company focused on the high growth platforms of social, mobile and online games.

Joel is a professor of social game design at The Games Academy in San Francisco, California. He teaches courses on successful social game design and focuses on key topics such as core compulsion loops, free-to-play game monetization, and social game virality.


Famous quotes containing the words joel and/or breton:

    They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
    Bible: Hebrew Isaiah, 2:4.

    The words reappear in Micah 4:3, and the reverse injunction is made in Joel 3:10 (”Beat your plowshares into swords ...”)

    To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery—even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness—is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
    —AndrĂ© Breton (1896–1966)