Jordan Weisman

Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded four major game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry.

In 1980 Weisman founded role playing game publisher FASA Corporation (short for the Freedonia Aeronautics & Space Administration, named after the fictional country in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup) with partner L. Ross Babcock. After starting out producing supplements for the pen and paper role-playing game Traveller. FASA later produced the successful BattleTech and Shadowrun franchises.

In 1995, Weisman founded FASA Interactive to personally take over the development and production of the hit MechWarrior PC games. The franchise is one of the top-selling PC games of all time, with sales of over 9 million units worldwide. In 1999, Microsoft acquired FASA Interactive and moved the 40-person development team to Redmond, Washington. As part of the deal Weisman became Creative Director for Microsoft's entertainment division.

Between the years of 2000-2011, Jordan Weisman has founded WizKids, which produced games Mage Knight, Heroclix, and Pirates of the Spanish Main. While working at Microsoft, Weisman developed the alternative reality game, The Beast, to promote the Steven Spielberg film A.I. His Cathy's Book, a novel with interactive elements co-written by Sean Stewart and illustrated by Cathy Brigg appeared from Running Press, in 2006. Weisman founded Smith & Tinker (named after the characters in The Wizard of Oz).

Smith & Tinker has licensed the electronic entertainment rights to Crimson Skies, Shadowrun, MechWarrior and other FASA properties that had belonged to Microsoft. During that same year, he co-founded the start-up Fyreball with Pete Parsons (formally of Bungie Studios and currently serves on the Board of Advisors along with Ed Fries), which is now operating under the name Meteor Solutions. In 2009, Weisman and J.C. Hutchins released Personal Effects: Dark Art (Griffin). On the same day Weisman along with Russ Bullock announced that the MechWarrior franchise would be seeing a relaunch. In September, 2011 Weisman partnered with Piranha Games to create the MechWarrior Reboot called MechWarrior Online.

Jordan is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinema-Television. In 2012 he started to raise money, through Kickstarter, for Shadowrun Returns, a new video game adaptation of Shadowrun.