Tadhg Kelly
Tadhg is a video game designer, producer, creative director, columnist and consultant. He has held roles at various video game development, technology and publishing companies. Since the early 90s, Tadhg has worked on all sorts of game projects, from boardgames and live action roleplaying games through to multi-million dollar PC projects. He has served as lead designer, senior producer and a number of other roles at several companies including BSkyB, Lionhead and Climax.
He was a cofounder of the social gaming startup Simple Lifeforms before moving on to becoming a consultant in the game design space through founding noted industry blog What Games Are (www.whatgamesare.com). A recent immigrant to the United States, Tadhg has most recently worked at Jawfish Games, OUYA and for some other studios on a consulting basis.
Tadhg is currently consulting out of Seattle for a variety of companies under the banner of Tadhg Kelly Game Design, as well as writing a book named Raw Game Design to be published next year by Focal Press and a weekly gaming column for TechCrunch. You can reach him at tadhgk@gmail.com.
Crunchbase profile →Featured Picks from Tadhg Kelly
Latest from Tadhg Kelly
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Welcome Back, Xbox One
In the tech press the news that Kinect got unbundled from Xbox One has been received as a sign of the company backing away from the future, but in the games press the news has been well received. Why? Because nobody really thought that vision of the future was exciting. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: The Politics Of Play Matter
As Nintendo’s PR gaffe around Tomodachi Life shows, it’s all too easy to get game politics wrong. But more than that the politics of representation, identity and money are becoming important forces in the dynamics of understanding games in general. Game makers increasingly have to be aware of identity, gender, orientations and so on, and not just in a token manner. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Is Formal Game Design Valuable?
While many people are familiar with the term “game designer”, they’re not sure what that job actually entails. Indeed inside the industry game designers often get little respect because they’re see as vamping frauds that cause more problems than they solve. This is not really true, but there is a gap between the ideal and utility of game design. Can it be solved? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: What Became Of Social Games?
Remember social games? Remember how they supposed to be the future, how they were transforming the games industry and all that? No? Strangely not many people seem to think about social games any more, or consider them as a thing. Their central story seems to have faded, replaced largely by other platforms and better functions. Is that a bad or a good thing? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Worrying About Indie Games
It’s been great times for indie games over the last few years, a true golden age compared to what went before. Yet I’m very worried that the great times are over and that – on multiple fronts – the forces of darkness are closing in. Are indie games about to go through a contraction, a difficult phase and a period of being disempowered once more? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Valley People And Games People
I recently made reference to the idea that Valley thinking and games industry thinking are very different, and some people asked me to explain what I meant. So here you go. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Fire TV And The “Casual Console”
Fire TV is basically doing what everybody’s been saying Apple TV should be doing by now. 80% of its pitch is about having video and music from many of the usual sources. The other 20% is that Fire TV is a microconsole focused on casual gaming. What does it mean? Will it work? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Virtual Reality, We Hardly Knew You
It might be white hot news that Facebook dropped two-bils on buying in, or that Valve’s Michael Abrash has joined Oculus as chief scientist, but I suspect that this generation of virtual reality is already dead. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Patreonomics And “Supposed To Be”
When considering the economics of games, I’m more and more fascinated by the potential of a scalable patronage model and seen on Patreon. But also by the games industry’s continuing resistance to new economics in the face of innovation. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Going Small
It’s amazing just how much small-team game development has changed. Not only it has become viable once again, small game makers have developed much more capacity. We seem to be living in a golden age of work-smarter that’s enabling the next generation of game makers to do more than ever. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Flappy Bird, Patterns And Context
It’s nice to know that the games industry can still surprise you and that – just when everybody thinks it’s been figured out – there’s room for a Flappy Bird. It’s another Dots, Temple Run, Ridiculous Fishing, Candy Crush Saga, Puzzle and Dragon, Tiny Wings or Fruit Ninja. The game that seems to just pop, leaving many heads scratching as to how it did it. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Generation Gygax
There is probably no single game that has been so influential for a generation as Dungeons and Dragons. On this, its 40th anniversary, I find myself asking whether the long-term legacy of D&D is one that will endure for all time, or whether it’s a generational thing. Will the ideas that inspired my generation of designers translate for the next generation, or will they be left behind? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Sports And Video Games
This weekend’s big game between the Seahawks and 49ers makes me think of the rise of video game broadcasting (through services like Twitch.tv) and its potential. At what point will video games cross over the mass-popularity threshold that sports have, and become the new tribal entertainment? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Local Stream Gaming
Valve and Sony both made big announcements at CES, but both visions look problematic. Sony is trying to push cloud-service gaming, an idea that failed with Onlive. Meanwhile Steam Machines seem overpriced and it’s hard to know what problem they solve. Are both over-solving a much simpler problem: local streaming of games in the home? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Why All The Clones?
Why are there so many game companies that clone or copy one another? A lot of it has to do with risk aversion, genre thinking and a lack of patience or process. It also tends to be a shortcut, but one with serious downsides. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Games And Money Are Still Weird
Suppose you have a passion-project game. You want to develop it for iOS, to be “console quality”. You want it to be cool. Given how everything has liberalized in the gaming market over the last few years, you would think that it would be much easier to get a project off the ground than it used to be. You’d be wrong. Games and investment are still weird. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: The Multiplayer Singularity
There’s a tendency in game design circles to think of the potential of games as being wrapped up in some great leap. When we have the breakthrough technology that somehow tells stories for example, or the game/life crossover that makes games meaningful in the everyday. What if that singularity moment, however, is something much simpler? Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: The Wacky World Of Convergent Divergence
It used to be the case that developers had a binary choice between a multi-platform strategy with lowest-common denominator game ideas, or make a bet on a single platform in the hope that its unique attributes would help them win. Both have historically been difficult because they implied compromise. I’m not so sure that it’s a choice they need to make any more. Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: Squeaky Bum Time
It’s hard to escape the feeling in the mobile games space that times are tougher than they were. Budgets are going up, investors are staying away and the sense that there’s just too many players in the market is high. At the same time, however, there is no evidence to suggest that players are walking away from playing games on their devices. What does all of this mean for the… Read More
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Crunch Network
What Games Are: The Power Conversation
Given the degree to which graphics have not changed over the last few years in high-end games, it’s surprising how strong the idea of graphical power remains in the games industry. Gamers are still hotly arguing over which games look best on which console, yet they are doing so over increasingly ephemeral details. Will this power conversation always dominate the gaming medium, or will… Read More
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