Reno, Nevada-based maker of slot machines and other gaming products International Game Technology has hired Chris Satchell to fill the newly-added position of CTO at the publicly listed company.
Satchell comes from Microsoft, where he filled the same role for Redmond’s Interactive Entertainment Business, responsible for technical strategy and execution across the video gaming business including Xbox, Games for Windows, Xbox LIVE and Microsoft Game Studios as well as future platform incubations.
Satchell is what you call an industry veteran, having held positions of executive director and engineering director at the 3DO Company and technical director at Silicon Dreams before joining Microsoft. At Redmond, he was general manager and chief software architect of XNA (Microsoft’s game development platforms and services), director of engineering for Microsoft Game Studios, and development manager for Studio RX (game titles such as Forza Motorsport, Fable and Crackdown).
Google finance got a new logo this morning.
That’s mind-boggling Chris, but what does it have to do with this particular news item?
Nothing. But it’s far more interesting though.
Wow – exciting horizontal corporate employee moves!
Microsoft should make their engineers sign non disclosure agreements. This guy is taking everything he learned at MS and giving it to another company.
Casino giant Harrah’s was doing work with MS a while back to develop some apps on MS’ Surface platform. None of them were actually gambling programs, just gimmicky bar games (http://www.micr...ng/gallery.mspx).
IGT probably wants to develop gambling apps on the Surface and thinks that having a MS guy will help their cause. MS Surface is a lot prettier and has a lot more capabilities than the typical Video poker machines you see built into a lot of Vegas bars