Michael Condrey is the former chief operating and development officer of Sledgehammer Games, which he co-founded with Glen Schofield. He was also an executive at Activision.
Career[]
Condrey graduated in 1997 from the University of Washington. The following year, his senior thesis on applying biotechnology to conservation biology was published in the Journal of Molecular Ecology. After serving as scuba diving instructor and boat captain in the Cayman Islands, he began work on a graduate degree in Seattle. It was there that launched his game development career, beginning with a summer job at Electronic Arts during the peak of Seattle's gaming explosion. Condrey later relocated to Redwood City at the EA-owned studio Visceral Games, where he became studio chief operations officer, as well as senior development director on the 2008 title Dead Space. He also worked on three other successful EA franchises: Need for Speed, FIFA, and the James Bond game series. In November 2009, Condrey and Visceral Games colleague Glen Schofield founded Sledgehammer Games, a subsidiary of Activision operating under that company's independent studio model. Condrey likened the opportunity to work with Activision and Call of Duty to a baseball player getting a call from the New York Yankees or a filmmaker hearing from Steven Spielberg After an initial attempt to create their own Call of Duty title, Condrey and Schofield collaborated with Infinity Ward on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The game grossed $1 billion in worldwide sales in its first 16 days and took the Best Shooter prize at the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards. The following year, the game was named Game Design of the Year at the Korea Games Conference and won the Global Award from Japan Game Awards 2012 at the Tokyo Game Show.
Leaving Sledgehammer Games[]
Condrey officially left the Sledgehammer Games studio on February 20th, 2018 alongside with the other Co-Founder of the studio Glen Schofield and was promoted to executive duties at Activision.[3] On February 4th, 2019 Take-Two Interactive announced the creation of a new 2K Games studio in the Silicon Valley with Michael Condrey as Studio Head.[4]
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