WHAT'S THE STORY?

Paul Jaquays currently hangs his professional hat at MicroSoft/Ensemble Studios in Dallas, Texas, where he works as an artist on Halo Wars (recent projects at Ensemble include Age of Empires III and The War Chiefs expansion for Age 3) . He began his 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. He 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 he joined TSR, Inc., the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons as a cover illustrator. In March of 1997 he took up level designing for id Software before moving on to Ensemble Studios in early 2002 to take a postions as a content designer.

Paul Jaquays’ early career is best defined by his 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, he had a hand in nearly every video game coming out for ColecoVision and the ADAM Computer. As a freelancer, he wrote and edited quite a few more roleplaying 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 he drew and painted for numerous publishers. As a TSR Illustrator, he’s 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 he created levels that appeared in Quake 2, Quake III: Arena, and Quake III: Team Arena. He is currently creating game art content for Halo Wars, a real time strategy game for the XBox 360 based on Bungie's Halo game franchise.

In addition to his work as a game designer, Paul 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 Ritual Entertainment, Paul Jaquays has helped to develop an intense curriculum that teaches students to be game developers in the course of 21 (used to be 18) months. He is responsible for designing the art for games curriculum. Paul's son Zach graduated with the Summer 2005 class of Guildhall, focusing on art for games and spent a year with Ensemble Studios working on both Age of Empires III and The War Chiefs as an artist.

Paul recently married Christine and together they are parents to a trio of tall, talented, grown-up kids (two are enrolled as college undergrad students) and have expanded their list of "owners" to include not only the former stray cats Charlie and Bones, but also Annabelle and Max, a brother and sister team of long-haired Balinese).

They all live somewhere in North Texas (Paul, Christine & the cats ... the kids have their own places now).

JAQUAYS.COM

Legal