ImaginEngine is a leading studio in the development of quality children's titles and casual title software. The ImaginEngine team is known for its award-winning, commercially successful console, handheld, PC and online games. ImaginEngine specializes in creating entertaining family-friendly experiences for kids and adults to enjoy. The studio has shipped nearly 200 titles across major platforms. ImaginEngine is a Foundation 9 Entertainment studio, and is located in Framingham, MA.

Randall Sanborn, Studio Head

Randall has been involved with ImaginEngine since it was founded in the early ‘90s and is also a season ticket holder for the Patriots.  He oversees all products for the Boston office. His experience has helped ship over 150 products, working at every level and phase of development.

Randall started with this group as the technical director, overseeing and developing cross platform libraries for several educational and entertainment CD-ROMs with a startup named Media Magic (which soon became Vipah Interactive.)  This company merged with ImaginEngine, with Randall becoming the CTO for all of ImaginEngine and overseeing all operations for the Boston office. Soon ImaginEngine merged with Digital Eclipse, forming Backbone Entertainment, and Randall became the VP of Boston operations and Technical Director. This role continued when Backbone merged with several other companies to form Foundation 9. Throughout these mergers, Randall and ImaginEngine have become synonymous for great products, with a focus on children’s games and the casual market.

Chris Zirpoli, Creative Manager

Having graduated from Penn State University in 1994 with a double-major in Creative Writing and English and a Minor in Advertising, Chris never dreamed that his career would revolve around the video game industry. While working in media research in Boulder, CO in 1997, Chris answered a newspaper ad for an Associate Producer for a company called Devil’s Thumb Entertainment, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, almost thirteen years later, Chris has held positions as a Producer, Marketing and PR Liaison, Lead Designer, Lead Writer, and Cinematic Director for both independent studios and publishers alike. With numerous titles to his credit that truly run the gambit of genres and platforms, in recent years, Chris’ main focus has been on creating casual games for kids of all ages. 

Mat Williams, Technical Manager

Typical Harvard delusions of grandeur led Mat Williams to found a small game development company after college.  Supporting himself via work in film animation and local theater productions he was lead designer and coder for an epic RPG.  From there Mat joined Boston based Tilted Mill where he worked on strategic and mass-market city building games for Vivendi Universal and Electronic Arts as well as a successful self-published “casual game for the hard-core gamer.”  Mat is constantly seeking ways to expand, combine, and reinvent game genres and mechanics to increase their appeal within the mass market and hard-core.  With experience as a lead designer, lead engineer, artist, and a focus on managing teams as a senior producer, Mat brings a unique cross-disciplinary viewpoint all every project.

Jane Pinckard, Business Development Analyst

Jane Pinckard started writing about videogames in 1997, a project that eventually evolved into the game culture blog GameGirlAdvance. She has written for a variety of publications including Xbox Nation and Salon.

In 2004 she served in Lawrence Lessig's Law in Virtual Societies class at Stanford Law School as a non-resident fellow. While a journalist in the Ziff Davis Media Game Group, she co-created The 1Up Show, a seminal weekly video internet show about game culture, as well as one of the first podcasts to cover videogames, 1UP Yours. During her tenure at CMP (now UBM) she worked on the speaker program for the Game Developers Conference, the industry's leading tradeshow for videogame developers, and launched the Game Career Seminar, focusing on students’ issues and concerns. She has spoken at SXSW, PAX, GDC, and other game and art events, and currently serves on the board of the professional association for game developers, the IGDA.