Troy Lyndon

Troy A. Lyndon (born November 29, 1964 in New York, NY) is an award-winning entrepreneur, game developer, and business coach.^[1]

Early life

Lyndon's parents are Jacquie Edelen, a homemaker, and David Lyndon, a retired professor, former Marine, and Director of the Navy's Aegis Program for RCA and Seasparrow Program Director for Raytheon Corporation. Adopted by David at age 6, he followed David's engineering footsteps completing his first 5 nationally published games before the age of 20.

He attended Moorpark College where he majored in Business Administration, but left college early to pursue more opportunities during the watershed years of the video game industry.

Career

At age 13, Troy Lyndon developed and sold his first video game professionally, titled Space Voyager for the Radio Shack TRS-80. Encouraged by his childhood friend, David Jennings,^[2] he followed with two additional games titled Great Wave, Space Quest and Conqueror also for the TRS-80.

He co-authored Atari to Commodore 64 game conversions of Time Runner, Snokie and Flak with co-developers Scott Maxwell and Yves Lempereur. He left to pursue video game development full-time.

Working under contract for Datasoft, Lyndon completed development of the Commodore 64 of Lost Tomb and developed from scratch the Commodore 64 version of Mr. Do!, consumer versions of coin-op arcade games.

Hired by GameStar, which was acquired by Activision, Lyndon started by developing simulated sprite drivers for the Macintosh version of Star League Baseball. Programming for GameStar continued even after the Activision acquisition while Lyndon went on to develop Star Rank Boxing, Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing, GBA 2-on-2 Basketball and portions of GFL 3D Football. He also produced the game version of Howard the Duck.

Branching out on his own, Lyndon signed a 15 title deal with Capcom to bring numerous coin-op games to the Commodore 64 and new IBM PC platforms. Games included Street Fighter, Sarge, Speed Rumbler, Hat Trick, 1942, Bionic Commando, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Side Arms, and Tiger Road. Lyndon became the co-founder of Pacific Dataworks International with Christopher T. Riggs.

Lyndon then started creating original games with co-developer, Michael Knox. They signed an agreement with DataEast to develop ABC's Monday Night Football and Dream Team Basketball for the PC. Monday Night Football was recognized as one of the best sports games of the year by nomination from the Software Publishers' Association, and it featured several technical innovations: it supported every current graphics card (Hercules Monochrome, CGA, EGA, VGA and 256 color VGA color modes), and included digitized audio played through the PC's internal speaker.

Madden Football

Due to the success of Monday Night Football on the PC, Electronic Arts sought out Lyndon and his partner Knox to develop a football game which became the first 3D Madden Football game ever developed. Lyndon originally opposed the idea of a 3D game by his lead programmer, Jim Simmons (a friend of Lyndon's who had never developed a professional software product before), but empowered him to create the display engine if he could meet certain timeline deadlines, while Steve Quinn developed graphics. Lyndon and Knox embedded everything they had learned in developing two previous football games into Madden with countless hours with programmer Simmons describing how to make computer animated objects appear as though they were as smart as humans in determining how to play each of the different positions played by football players in real life. Lyndon credits Electronic Arts' producer Richard Hilleman for his countless hours spent with Simmons bug-testing and refining the game which was developed on the new Sega Genesis platform in record time; 6 months in-time for the product launch.

After Madden Football's success, Lyndon and Knox with programmer Jim Simmons went on to create the first NHL Hockey video game for the Sega Genesis platform. Utilizing green-screen video capturing equipment, Lyndon and his developers went on to create technologies to rotoscope real-life imagery of NHL characters directly into characters which appeared in video games. As a result, Lyndon built the video game industry's first dedicated filming studio (sound stage).

Over 5 years, Knox and Lyndon grew their development company, Park Place Productions, to 130 employees with several separate divisions, including Game Development, Publishing and Testing, servicing at peak 14 publishers while making 45 games at once.

Lyndon left the video games industry for a brief stint to develop CD-ROM productivity products for Computer Associates including Simply House, Stanley's Complete Book of Home Repair and Improvement and Simply Vacation, the first database driven travel-agent custom vacation software product ever developed. Both products were also innovative in terms of content size. They were also two of the first 10 CD-ROM titles ever to include Intel's Indeo full-screen video playback technology.

Returning to work exclusively under contract with Corel Corporation, Lyndon built a second generation filming studio (sound stage) for the game industry. The first game was Where in the World is Madison Jaxx, an education game on five CD-ROMs intended to teach geography to teenagers and adults. Secondly, Lyndon produced a motion picture; "Arthur, the King, the Sword, the Legend", which included more than 5 hours of film featuring more than 60 actors and actresses and a first-time green-screen implementation of horse motion (from a polo field) into a video game. As a results of Corel's departure from the video game industry, other interactive motion pictures included Sinbad, Sargasso: Sea of Fear, Atlantis and Mind Traveler were never finished or released.

Christian Media projects

After reading a book by Bob Buford called Half Time, Lyndon left the video games industry for a few years to serve with the Jesus Film Project, the largest missionary organization of Campus Crusade for Christ. Originally starting by fixing computers, Lyndon was quickly moved into multimedia development by completing improvements to the Jesus Film DVD Internet Game. Shortly thereafter, Lyndon started Jesus Technologies where he completed numerous projects for Campus Crusade and other ministries, including a new version of the Missions Atlas Project, The Jesus Film CD-ROM in Arabic, the Jesus: Fact or Fiction DVD, the Jesus Film Kiosk, the Outreach CD Project, an InTouch Ministries CD-ROM and the Evangelism Toolbox CD-ROM for Campus Crusade for Christ, in association with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Back to his developing roots, Lyndon embarked on the development of a technology to allow consumers to click on items of interest in a video stream, whether it be a fancy car or a nice sweater. This innovation has not yet been developed for mainstream interactive television. However, Lyndon is the Inventor of this Patented technology.^[3]

iLumina is the first interactive Bible and encyclopedia suite ever created. Developed by a team of more than 30 developers, Lyndon was engaged with only 9 months remaining in the project schedule to manage all of the interactive programming which had not started. Beginning from scratch, Lyndon achieved this goal despite content delivery delays of more than 6 months. Its features include QuickTime VR, full-screen video animation, and a fully interactive verse-by-verse first graphical view of the New Living Translation Bible.

Starting in 2002, Lyndon began development of a Christian video game based upon the popular Left Behind saga, co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The Left Behind novels have sold more than 65 million copies through publisher Tyndale House Publishers. Left Behind: Eternal Forces has gone on to sell more than 70,000 copies and has become the most widely distributed Christian video game of all time, although it was released amid tremendous controversy.

In an effort to raise the necessary capital to launch the first widely distributed Christian video game, Left Behind Games, Incorporated went public in February 2006. Although it has retained its corporate name, the company now does business as Inspired Media Entertainment.

Controversy

On September 25, 2013, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission announced that they entered into a civil lawsuit against Lyndon.^[4] The SEC alleged, without ever providing evidence to the court, that Lyndon inflated the company's revenue by granting stock as pay to a consultant, who then sold the stock, and used the proceeds to purchase inventory of the company.

Lyndon entered into a no-admit, no-deny settlement with the SEC. After the SEC failed to provide discovery in accordance with the terms of the settlement agreement with Lyndon, Lyndon filed an appeal which includes documents providing the public with 10 years of Left Behind Games' "audited" financials to support his claim that the SEC fraudulently fabricated financial records to the court in order to wrongfully obtain a financial judgment.^[5]

Independent of the SEC's allegations, the SEC suspended trading of Left Behind Games, Inc. in September–October 2013, due to lack of information about the company, after failure to file certain reports with the SEC.^[6] In Lyndon's appeal, he claims and provides evidence to substantiate that the reason Left Behind Games was unable to meet its quarterly filing requirements was a result of a lack of finances, resulting directly from SEC's interference with the company's $10 million financing in October 2011. In Lyndon's appeal, he alleges that SEC investigators intentionally omitted material evidence and accordingly, such staff could be held liable for damages against Lyndon in accordance with the Federal Tort Claims Act of 2013.^[7]

Awards

Lyndon and Knox were recognized when awarded the Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year Award by Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch.^[8] Former employees from Park Place Productions include John Smedley, current President of Sony Online, Chris Whaley (Red Zone Interactive) and others. Products produced under Lyndon's supervision included Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Kawasaki for GameTek Inc., Madden Football and NHL Hockey for Electronic Arts, Mohammad Ali Boxing, Magic Johnson Basketball and David Robinson Basketball for Virgin Games, NFL Football for Konami, Quarterback Club Football for Acclaim, ESPN Baseball for Sony, Batman and numerous others.

Notes

References

External links

• Troy Lyndon Official Site
• Troy Lyndon's Brand Page
• Jesus Technologies

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