Former Gaikai Officer Brendan Iribe tabbed as Oculus CEO
It seems as though it's been a rough couple of weeks for cloud-based gaming companies. Last week, we had the news that OnLive was shutting down even after their strong showing at E3. Now, Brendan Iribe is leaving Gaikai to join up with Oculus as their CEO. Kickstarter proved to be a fantastic idea for Oculus and, because of this, has managed to not only pull Iribe from Gaikai, but a couple of prominent officers as well. I had commented that OnLive, Gaikai, and even the Ouya, were the future of gaming for cloud-based services. Now, perhaps there needs to be a step back from the ledge.
Former Gaikai and Scaleform Officer, Brendan Iribe, Joins Oculus as CEO
Los Angeles – August 14, 2012 - On the heels of its highly successful Kickstarter launch, Oculus, a developer of virtual reality (VR) technology, announced that the former Gaikai chief product officer and Scaleform CEO, Brendan Iribe, has joined Oculus as CEO. Other key hires include Michael Antonov and Jack McCauley, who join Oculus as chief software architect and vice president of engineering, respectively.
“The success of our Kickstarter campaign has been overwhelming and a bit humbling, but now it’s time to deliver on the promise,” said Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus. “We’ve done the R&D and have blown people away with our prototypes. These hires, all of whom have many years of experience developing technology for video games, will ensure that we first deliver rock-solid dev kits, then a consumer product that takes video games to a completely new level of immersion.”
In 2004, Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov co-founded Scaleform, a developer of UI middleware for video games. Scaleform was eventually acquired by Autodesk in March of 2011, but not before seeing its award-winning software development kit (SDK) included in over 1000 high end video games. After overseeing the transition to Autodesk, Brendan moved on to Gaikai as the chief product officer leading the user experience and product development teams. He now lends his deep industry experience and knowledge of gaming technology to Oculus and its VR product, the Oculus Rift.
“For years we’ve talked about virtual reality, and how amazing it would be to actually play within a game, rather than just watch it happen in front of you on a screen,” said Brendan Iribe. “As a serial entrepreneur, I thrive in start-up environments, and Oculus is as exciting and disruptive as they come. The core technology is already there. Now it’s up to the growing team at Oculus to get it into the hands of both developers and gamers everywhere.”
Joining Brendan are two other veterans of the game technology space. Michael Antonov was CTO at Scaleform and software architect at Autodesk, and now comes on board as chief software architect, responsible for the Oculus SDK. Jack McCauley comes to Oculus from R0R3 Devices, a product engineering company, where he led the development and manufacturing of numerous popular video game peripherals including Activision's highly acclaimed guitar and drum controllers, which shipped millions of units worldwide.
