Acclaim Announces 'Project: Top Secret' Competition Winner

Mike Zummo, 34, a usability expert from Milwaukee, Wisc., has won first place in Acclaim Games’ and Dave Perry’s “Project: Top Secret” competition first announced in 2007. Nicknamed “Doran” in the project, Zummo has served as co-director of the Top Secret Advisory Board since its inception in November 2007. Zummo will be awarded with a directorship role on an upcoming game from Acclaim Games, working with Perry as executive producer. In addition to naming one lucky winner, the organizers of the competition also recently announced a short list of people who have since been hired to work in the game development industry as a result of participating. Within two weeks of the contest launch, Perry (the project’s director and formerly of Naughty Dog) hired Michael Liebwein, who has since designed a new game for Acclaim that’s now in development. Paul Lipscombe, another contestant, was recruited directly from the online forum related to the project. Lipscombe is now directing a new project with Perry to celebrate Flash Game Development talent: www.thefanawards.org. Another community member, Matt Edwards, was hired to be the programmer on the same web site. Finally, Michelle Montierth, co-director of the Top Secret Advisory Board, has just been hired as the head of Acclaim’s new localization department. Acclaim has said it is actively interviewing other members of the community for future positions as well, and calls the project "the biggest user-generated game design team ever assembled." Said Perry in a release, “I think we’ve proven that this is a great way to find super passionate people, by creating an incredibly difficult task, unleashing it on a massive amount of people who live for games, using the latest internet technologies, and hiring the ones that rose to the top. It’s a win-win and you can be sure we will be doing more of it in the future."