SGC announces Keynote Speaker: John Zuur Platten

The Shawnee Game Conference (SGC) is proud to announce the first keynote speaker for this fall’s event: John Zuur Platten.

John has a twenty-year career in the entertainment business, writing for video games, films, television, digital media, and books. Starting as a tour guide at Universal Studios, John began working in production on shows such as The New Lassie, Matlock, and Harry and the Hendersons. His work as a Visual Effects Producer in the early days of video games led to a relationship with Sega, where John designed, produced, and wrote the highly successful Sega CD, Tomcat Alley. Realizing his love of video games, John would write and produce Johnny Mnemonic for Sony Imagesoft, leading to an overall production agreement with Propaganda Code, where he developed several titles and film properties for Philips Media.

John then created Fear Effect for Eidos, which was named the PlayStation action game of the year by IGN. The film Venom, released by Dimension, was based on an original property he co-created with Flint Dille. John has written and designed over sixty projects for every major publisher and studio, including HAWx2, Apache Air Assault, Wanted: Weapons of Fate, Ghostbusters, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Escape from Butcher Bay and Dark Athena (Chronicles of Riddick saga) and Wheelman. John’s book The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design (co-authored by Flint Dille) has remained a top seller on Amazon.com since its release. John was a creative at Niantic Labs, the developer of Ingress and Pokémon GO, and a creative consultant on a reboot of his Fear Effect property for Square Enix Collective. He recently developed Summoners War as a multi-platform property for Skybound.

His latest project was writing Jurassic World: Evolution 2 for Universal and Frontier Developments. John has also just written a new Ghostbusters DLC pack for Planet Coaster to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the original film’s release. His comics, St. Mercy and Revolvers are available from Top Cow and Image.

SGC is the oldest academic gaming conference in the midwest - the the place where all gaming worlds collide. Whether you’re a gamer, programmer, developer, promoter, designer, educator, industry specialist, or just simply someone who loves technology and games, this is the event for you. Join John and all the other great speakers this fall!