Alan Emrich - Brief Career History

Brief Career History

In 1977 Emrich and John Meyers co-founded the ORCCON game convention in Los Angeles, and later Emrich helped in the start-up of the GATEWAY and GAMEX conventions, also in Los Angeles. Emrich was the first Vice-President of the Game Manufacturers Association. In the 1980s he founded a game company Diverse Talents Inc., which imported and exported games, ran the Los Angeles game conventions, and published several magazines including Fire & Movement. In this period he also designed some board and card games.

During the 1990s Emrich worked for Computer Gaming World magazine as its first Strategy Game Editor and later its first Online Editor. In this period he also wrote or co-wrote the strategy guides listed above. Until April 2002 he was a lead designer of Master of Orion 3.

In 2001 Emrich received the Blomgren / Hamilton Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement from ConsimWorld.COM.

He is currently a professor at the Art Institute of California: Orange County, where he teaches Game Design, Prototyping, and Project Management to the next generation of game makers — he regards this as an "official" instance of his lifelong passion for teaching. He also co-founded and owns Victory Point Games, a desktop publishing company for small, budget-priced games based around submissions from students and professional game designers alike — in fact he founded the company in order to give his students experience of the business side of game publishing.