Alejandro (Alex) Portilla

Alex Portilla was born in Miami Florida and has been making video games since the early 1980s. He was introduced to video games through the RCA Studio II console in the late 1970s, where he played pong and bowling. He first learned how to program on a Commodore Vic 20, using the popular book series BASIC Computer Games. Soon thereafter his father hired a tutor to further teach him how to program. His first original release was a BBS coded in Applesoft Basic, along with his brother Miguel, (on a Franklin Ace 1100) circa 1985. It allowed people to call in with their modems to exchange messages and play games. In the early 1990s he and his brother launched the popular multiline BBS named ABUSE in Miami. It hosted 24 roll-over lines, 4 player Doom 2 games, over 250 cd's, and many "door" games programmed by the brothers.

Alex launched his first video games studio, Gamespring, in 1997 along with brother Miguel and childhood friend Vinnie Falco (creator of Bear Share). This was his first indie venture, work was mandatory 6 days a week. A year later they had produced an RTS/RPG engine with the first few levels of the game completed - Dungeoncraft was born. The game introduced new features never before seen in the industry. It included realtime screen split view of up to four players, 16 bit graphics, dynamic lighting, particles, and in depth graphics layering system. Gamespring and Dungeoncraft where featured in the "Special Report" 1998 issue of Hacker magazine.

In 1998 Alex worked at Elsinore Multimedia (acquired by Activision) as the Art Director for Cabela's Big Game Hunter. Cabela's Big Game Hunter pioneered the Walmart $19.99 price point for video games, it also became one of Activision's most successful franchises.

In 1999 Alex Joined Electronic Arts as a Lead Interface Designer, where he designed and implemented the front end for Madden Football, Tiger Woods, James Bond (online) and Lord Of The Ring (Online). Alex played a critical role in developing the ground breaking "Game Face" front end for Tiger Woods in 2003.

In 2003 he and his brother Miguel launched a new indie studio named PoBros, Inc. Initial focus was on cell phone games but that later expanded PC, Mac, and Social. They successfully created 11 games which landed top marks in the early Casual Games community. They formed publishing alliances with Disney, Yahoo, Big Fish Games, Real Arcade, iWin and Oberon. In 2009, the brothers were featured in The Cherokee Scout NC newspaper as the next hot indie studio. In 2010 they were the recipient of the FREC award for Game Design.

In early 2012 Alex (Vice President), Miguel (Vice President) and Abdulhaddy Taher (CEO) formed Skyjoy Interactive, located in downtown Brickell, Miami, FL. Skyjoy's primary goal is to become the premier iOS/Android games developer. Their first game, Super Kid Cannon, has been in development 1 year and is slated for release 2013.

Current projects

On January 2012, Alex began working on Super Kid Cannon and it is slated for release mid 2013 on the iOS and Android platforms.

Awards

• Electronic Arts Team Player award, 2004
• Film Recording Entertainment Council award, 2010

Games credited

Participated In Development

• Deneba Canvas (1997)
• NCAA (2000)
• Fight Night (2004)