Jason Coleman
Studio Technical Director

Jason Coleman leads the programming effort for Big Huge Games. With fifteen years of industry experience, Jason thrives on the ever-changing landscape of game development and on working with some of the coolest, most creative people on the planet.

Having completed his Masters in Physics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Jason's extraordinary career in gaming began when he took a summer leave from his PhD studies to work in the Quality Assurance department at Microprose. Within the first week, he fell in love with the industry and requested a year off from his PhD studies. But he never returned. While working in QA (the mail-room of its day), Jason morphed the Fortran he had used in solving special cases of general relativity into C skills and was "discovered" within a few months. He began a new career building system and multimedia code for games including Civilization II and Colonization.

In 1996, Jason left Microprose to become Firaxis' first employee. With the "many hats" prerequisite of working for a start-up, Jason set up the network, managed the hardware, and coded the core engine for both Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds. This enabled the development of Sid Meier's Gettysburg! and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

In 2000, Jason left Firaxis to help found Big Huge Games with the goal of making AAA games that are both critical successes and commercial blockbusters. He was the Lead Programmer on Rise of Nations (2003), Rise of Legends (2006), and Catan! for XBLA (2007).

As Technical Director, Jason sets the tone for the programming team at Big Huge Games. Professionally, he is most proud of having created a culture of strong critical self-assessment and development coupled with a love of games. His goal is to attract people who are smarter than he, whether they know it or not. He emphasizes elegant, straight-forward solutions and strives for fast, robust iteration in code and content. Jason believes the programming team should serve the end-users: artists, designers, other programmers, and of course the gamers. Still a coder-at-heart, he enjoys the problem-solving challenges as Big Huge develops games for various platforms, including: PC, XBOX 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii.

Jason holds a B.A. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University and a Masters in Physics from UNC-Chapel Hill.