Chris Roberts



Chris Roberts is the co-founder, CEO, chief creative officer of Cloud Imperium Games, and the director of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

He was born in the Redwood City, California, US in 1968, moved to Manchester UK where he met Martin Galway in High School.

About
He would go in on the weekends to his father's university which had a computer, he was fascinated about the presence of games on it and the possibility to animate things, which is how he got an interest in how to program, so he could figure out how to animate imagery.

His father, noticing the Chris Roberts budding interest in programming, signed him for an extra-curricular class at Manchester University. Around the age of 12, Chris Roberts began to learn BASIC.

With a friend he was at the back of the class, ignoring the class and trying to program games.

The next year, the teacher of that class became the editor of The Micro User magazine. He remembered that Chris Roberts and his friend were in the back of the class trying to make games, so he called up and asked if he would like to write a 'game of the month' for the magazine.

He sold his first game King Kong at the age of 13, and developed 3 number one hits by the age of 20: Match Day, Wizadore and Stryker's Run.

In the mid-1980s, his familly moved to the U.S. and Chris Roberts who was attending Manchester University at the time opted to stay behind, but soon joined his parents in Texas.

At 19 he was working on Ultra Realm, the precursor to what would become Times of Lore. He contacted Denis Loubet to make some art, who in the meantime got hired on as a fulltime artist at nearby Origin Systems, thus ending up with a publishing contract at Origin Systems.

In 1987, Roberts got a publishing contract with Origin Systems where he made Times of Lore and Bad Blood. Despite having an office there he wasn't an employee.

In 1990, Roberts developed Wing Commander, which evolved into a franchise series of game titles, all developed and produced by Chris Roberts.

He eventually left Origin to be in a smaller more focused company and group to do a small number a high quality games a year and know everyone who was walking down the corridor. He also wanted the ability to exploit universes and stories he created or other people in the company created and take them to film or tv and be small enough to react, whereas Electronic Arts which had acquired Origin didn't care about the film business.

He co founded Digital Anvil, the game development and digital effects company he founded in 1996 aged about 27 with funding from Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices. In December of 2000, Roberts sold Digital Anvil to Microsoft.

He then founded Fever Pitch Studios, which was acquired by Warthog Games en 2003.

He founded Ascendant Pictures in March 2002. In 2004, Chris Roberts earned an Executive Producer credit on The Punisher and produced The Big White (Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson) and Lord Of War (Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, Jared Leto). In 2005, Roberts produced Lucky Number Slevin. In addition, he served as Executive Producer on The Jacket (Adrien Brody and Keira Knightly) and the Robert Towne film, Ask The Dust (Colin Farrell and Selma Hayek). Ascendant Pictures was acquired by Bigfoot Entertainment in 2010.

In 2011, Chris Roberts founded Cloud Imperium Games with his wife Sandi Roberts, as well as business partner and long-time international media attorney Ortwin Freyermuth.

Trivia

 * He's a fan of science fiction, has seen Star Wars when he was 8 with his brother Erin Roberts, going home to build star wars spaceships out of Legos before Legos made them and reading massive amounts of books from authors such as Heinlein, Asimov or Le Guin.
 * He appears on a mural in the game Kingdom Come: Deliverance.