Ben Garney is the founder of The Engine Company, a technical consulting firm providing services ranging from implementation to product architecture and development to fractional CTO. Ben has had exits as key hire, co-founder and founder. His work has powered hundreds of millions of user experiences, been shown on the TED Prime stage and used in planetary robotics research. He co-wrote a book, Video Game Optimization, and has done technical review for a number of others. His areas of expertise include internet video, AR/VR, game engines, and engineering team leadership.
Ben’s game credits include Marble Blast Ultra, ZAP (now BitFighter), Blockland, Legions, Social City, Disney City Girl, Double Doodle, Where’s My Water 2 (Android port), EverWing and Marble It Up!. He co-wrote Video Game Optimization (2010), and co-authored several papers in the planetary robotics field. Ben has spoken at the Flash Gaming Summit, Adobe MAX, FITC, GDC Online, and the Game Developers Conference. Ben’s consulting clients include Adobe, Disney/Playdom, Kabam, Dolby and MGM.
Ben founded the The Engine Company in 2012 to build the Loom SDK, an open source framework for mobile, desktop, and IoT apps and games. TEC provides consulting services to companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s in areas including streaming video production and playback, mobile game development, highly scalable backends, prototyping, and more. Loom was acquired by Game Closure in 2017.
Jeff Tunnell, Rick Overman, Tim Aste, Ben Garney, and Sean Sullivan founded PushButton Labs in 2008. Ben designed, developed, and evangelized the PushButton Engine, an open source Flash game framework. PBE was used by Zynga, Playdom, RockYou, Hive7, among others. In May of 2010, approximately 1% of the earth’s population played games powered by PBE. Ben lead frontend development for the award-winning Social City, as well as an unreleased title. He also served as an advisor to Adobe around Flash Player. PushButton Labs was acquired by Disney in 2011.
Ben joined GarageGames in 2003 as the first employee. In his role as Torque Technologies Director, his focus was the Torque series of game engines (TGE, TGB, TGEA, TNL). Torque licensors included Electronic Arts, NC Soft, Sony, Disney, Vivendi Universal, Hasbro, NASA, L3, Lockheed Martin, and IBM. In addition to contributing to GarageGames community games, he worked on Fallen Empire: Legions (directly leading to a Penny Arcade comic), Zap and 750,000-unit-selling XBox 360 launch title Marble Blast Ultra. GarageGames was acquired by InterActive Corp in 2007.
Ben Garney 