When Jenova (aka Xinghan Chen) was a graduate student in USC’s Interactive Media Program, we hired him to help us build the Montage game in our Russian Modernism on-line courseware project. He was the only one on our team who knew how to create animated figures that would work within an interactive environment. Not surprisingly, he helped us enormously and then went on to become the most well known game designer to emerge from USC’s Interactive program, one who created innovative non-violent games like Cloud, Flow and Flower and who co-founded Thatgamecompany in 2006 when he was only 25. Born in Shanghai, he always brought an international dimension to his projects.
