Gaming Guest of Honor
Jennell Jaquays ~First Time Guest~
Jennell Jaquays (formerly Paul Jaquays) currently serves as the Lead Level Designer on the World of Darkness MMO project for CCP North America near Atlanta, Ga, focusing on world design. She has worked at CCP since August of 2009. Early in 2009 Microsoft closed Ensemble Studios after she completed her work as an artist on Halo Wars* a real time strategy game for the XBox 360 console.
She began her career in the mid 70s as a pioneering artist and designer in the area of pre-created game adventures for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) pencil and paper role-playing game by way of the D&D fan magazine, The Dungeoneer. She moved on to designing and directing the design of video games for Coleco in the early 80s; then on to freelancing as an artist, writer, editor, and game designer after that up until the early 90s when she joined TSR, Inc., the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons as a cover illustrator. In March of 1997 she took up level designing for id Software before moving on to Ensemble Studios in early 2002 to take a position as a content designer on a prototyping team, then later moved over to the art team to work on Age of Empires III.
Jennell Jaquays’ early career is best defined by her designs for RPG adventures like Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia for Judges Guild and Griffin Mountain for Chaosium. As eventual Director of Game Design at Coleco, she had a hand in nearly every video game coming out for ColecoVision and the ADAM Computer. As a freelancer, she wrote and edited quite a few more role-playing game adventures for TSR, designed the encounters for Interplay’s version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings, vol. 1) and lost count of the number of illustrations she drew and painted for numerous publishers. As a TSR Illustrator, she is best known for a distinctive bright red dragon that was used on the cover of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons boxed game adventure, Dragon Mountain and later on the Dragonlance story collection, Dragons of Krynn. While at id she created levels that appeared in Quake 2, Quake III: Arena, and Quake III: Team Arena. She recently worked on the art side of multiplayer map creation for Halo Wars, a real time strategy game for the XBox 360 based on Bungie's Halo game franchise.
In addition to her work as a game designer and artist, Jennell Jaquays has been instrumental in establishing Guildhall at SMU, a graduate level game development program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. Along with the likes of veteran developers Graeme Devine and Sandy Petersen of Ensemble Studios and Richard "levelord" Gray of Levelord Games, Jennell Jaquays has helped to develop an intense curriculum that teaches students to be game developers in the course of 21 months. She is responsible for designing the original art for games curriculum. Jennel's son Zach graduated with the second cohort of Guildhall students in 2005, focusing on art for games. Zach is already a 7 year veteran of the digital game industry with credits in numerous shipped titles.
In December of 2012, Jennell announced that she was transsexual and set in motion the processes to live the rest of her life as a woman, and that she was doing so with the full support of her immediate family.
Jennell has two children by her first marriage and a stepdaughter from her second. All three found their way into entertainment related careers, despite her best efforts to direct them into normal lives. Jennell Jaquays currently lives near Atlanta, GA with her long-time feline companion, Charlie.
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* All game and publication credits prior to 2012 will likely be found under the name Paul Jaquays.
