Jeff Briggs

Dr. Jeffery L. Briggs (born March 10, 1957, in Florence, Alabama) is founder and former President and CEO of Firaxis Games, a video game developer based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, United States. He was previously a game designer at MicroProse but left that company in 1996 along with Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds to form Firaxis Games.

Businessman

Briggs holds a Doctorate in Musical Composition and Theory from the University of Illinois. His career began in New York City where he composed music for various events, including dance and theater groups. He took a job as Game Editor and Designer at West End Games where he worked until 1987. He then joined MicroProse Software, where he served as designer, writer, composer, producer, Executive Producer and, finally, Director of Product Development. He left in 1996 to found Firaxis Games, where he led the design of Civilization III and oversaw the expansion of the company into a major developer of strategy computer games. Briggs also co-designed Colonization and Civilization II, as well as composing much of the original music in Civilization 4. In 1996 he was awarded US Patent 5,496,962 for a "System for Real-Time Music Composition and Synthesis" used in a product called "CPU Bach".

In 2003 Briggs was named software "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Ernst & Young, and in 2004 he was named "CEO of the Year" by Baltimore SmartCEO magazine. Briggs negotiated the acquisition...
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