Well Played
As a video game developer and professor, Gordon Bellamy ’88 has worked to make the gaming industry and its technology more inclusive.
BY IAN ALDRICH
Can a video game change the world? Maybe not, but a healthy gaming culture can help heal divisions, says Gordon Bellamy ’88, a pioneering game executive whose work has included leading stints at Electronic Arts (EA) Sports, Tencent, MTV, and Spike TV.
“When you have people from different parts of the world, from different walks of life, participating in something where they all have to operate under the same rules, that can be extremely powerful,” says Bellamy, now a professor of the practice of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. “A really valuable discourse can take place.”
A native of Reston, Virginia, Bellamy showed a high aptitude for math early on. He was identified as a prodigy in the first grade, and math camps became a staple of his summers, with competitions the rest of the year. As an adolescent, he attended the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth and Duke University’s Talent Identification Program. In 1984, Bellamy’s MATHCOUNTS team won the competition’s inaugural national championship.
He arrived at St. Paul’s two years later as a new Fifth Former. For Bellamy, who was still wrestling with his sexual identity and had spent much of his life navigating elite, white spaces, the School offered an important feeling of community.
“It was a meaningful time for me,” he says, “to feel valued and celebrated for who I am. I had the freedom to follow my own path.”
The experience wasn’t unlike the sense of liberating exploration he felt playing video games as a child. At Harvard, where he majored in engineering, Bellamy set a determined path to a career in the industry. In the summer of 1993, he landed a coveted internship with gaming giant EA, which led to a permanent job. His inclusive work at EA revolutionized how the gaming industry embraced the people who used their products. Bellamy’s ground-breaking idea was to give those users the ability to better see themselves in the games they were playing. His landmark work came with Madden NFL ’95, in which he advanced the technology to portray Black athletes for the first time, reflecting the faces of the majority of NFL players. Bellamy’s innovations also paved the way for the game to incorporate other personalized options, including left-handed players, season-long play, and the ability for teams to negotiate trades.
“What I wanted was Maddens for everybody,” says Bellamy, who received EA’s Rookie of the Year Award for his work. “How many ways can we have everyone at the table?”
Bellamy has continued to be an important design and thought leader in the gaming world. Among his many roles, he has served as head of the industry’s two main trade groups, the International Game Developers Association and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. He is currently the CEO of Gay Gaming Professionals. In 2020, he was featured in the Netflix docuseries High Score, which tells the story of gaming’s earliest key creators and designers.
“It’s hard to be something if you can’t see it,” says Bellamy, who lives with his husband in Los Angeles and is committed to helping the next generation of creators blaze new trails. “As I tell my students, many of the roles they’ll have probably don’t exist at the moment. All you can do is prepare to be the best version of yourself.”