Biography
David Perry was born on April 4, 1967 in Lisburn, the third-largest city in Northern Ireland. He spent his childhood in a little village called Templepatrick and in small townland Donegore in County Antrim. He was a student in Templepatrick Primary School and graduated from Methodist College Belfast.
In 1982, at the age of 15, he created his first video game for the Sinclair ZX81, which, according to David, was a driving game, "a black blob avoiding other black blobs".Later this year he was offered a job where he earned £3,500 per year.
In 1984, at the age of 17, David developed games for such famed publishers as Virgin Games, Elite System and Mirrorsoft, after he moved to London. He was a part of development team for The Terminator video game and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
In 1991 after he received an offer from Virgin Games to work as lead developer in America - he moved to California. While he was working in Virgin Games he put his hands on 7-UP's Cool Spot, Disney's Aladdin and McDonald's Global Gladiators which became best-seller games and well reviewed by critics.
In 1993, October 1, David formed his own company naming it after the song by R.E.M. "Shiny Happy People". It was a start for Shiny Entertainment studio. They had developed lots of award winning games such as Earthworm Jim series, MDK, Enter The Matrix, Sacrifice, etc. The release of Earthworm Jim, in particular, put Shiny front-row center as a developer to be watched.
In 2002, Atari Inc. acquired Shiny for $42 million. Perry remained in the position of President till late 2006 when he left Shiny and created GameConsultants.com, followed by GameInvestors.com.
In November 2008 David Perry co-founded Gaikai.com with Andrew Gaultand and Rui Pereira in Orange County, California. It is a cloud-based gaming service, a competitor to OnLive and OTOY, running on Adobe Flash player. Gaikai is funded by Limelight Networks, Rustic Canyon Partners, Intel Capital, Benchmark Capital and TriplePoint Capital.
In February 2008 David released 2.0 version of Game Industry Map website which is a large games and video game companies database powered by Google Maps. From November 2008 till now David is working as a co-founder of Gaikai.com.
On July 2, 2012 Gaikai.com was acquired by Sony for $380 million and is an integral part of Sony's Playstation 4.
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