SPEAKERS
We’ll enjoy three great talks
Chris Melissanos
Chris Melissinos’ work consistently centers on games as craft that’s capable of shifting culture. At AWS, he serves as a developer advocate and Principal Evangelist for Video Games and Immersive Technologies. Earlier roles span both the tech and games industries, including leadership positions at Sun Microsystems and Verizon.
His work frames games as a cultural medium: he created the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s The Art of Video Games exhibition, tracing how the medium evolved and why it matters.
He co-authored the companion book, The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect, and is a founding board member of the Video Game History Foundation. He is also a voting BAFTA member and advises Women in Games International and Community Clubhouse.
Olivier Madiba
Olivier Madiba is the founder of Kiro’o Games, a Cameroon-based studio built to prove ambitious, locally rooted game development can ship without waiting for perfect conditions. Over more than two decades, he has led the studio through the practical grind of making games where basic infrastructure can be unreliable, including extended electricity and internet outages.
Kiro’o’s breakthrough project, Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, brought African fantasy to Xbox and PC from a fully African studio – and required bold technical choices, including building their own engine. Since then, he and his team have continued to solve “missing pieces” hands-on: from integrating mobile payments to doing deep, on-the-ground research into local player behavior. His work is a case study in building games by engineering around constraints – and turning those constraints into original creative direction.