Officials from the recently formed Trion World Network, an online publisher and developer of games and original entertainment for the broadband era, have announced that the company has hired Russ Brown and Greg Barwis to head product development and network operations. Specifically, Brown will serve as the company's senior development director at Trion's corporate headquarters in Redwood City, California, while Barwis has taken a role as the director of IT and network operations at Trion's Technology Center in Austin, Texas. Brown comes to Trion from Electronic Arts, where he worked as a development director on notable franchises such as The Lord of the Rings and James Bond. Officials note that the executive has been responsible for more than 30 titles on consoles and PCs in his 20 year career, which started in 1987 at SSI on the Dungeons and Dragons "Gold Box" era games. At Trion, Brown will establish production processes for the company's game development teams and to guide those teams through all stages of development. Barwis joins Trion with more than 25 years of IT and engineering experience, most recently from online games publisher and developer NCsoft, where he managed networks composed of over 1,000 systems across nine sites in the US and Europe, including planning, implementation and deployment, as well as several complicated server migrations and launches. At Trion, Barwis will use his experience with hardware, systems software, and networking to design infrastructure that optimizes performance, cost, and scalability. "Russ and Greg bring tremendous experience in establishing the best practices of design and development for both video and online games, as well as an unrivaled ability to execute," commented Dr. Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion World Network, regarding the new additions to the company. Trion is headed by Buttler, the former vice president of Global Online at Electronic Arts, and Jon van Caneghem, founder and former publisher of New World Computing, and creator of the bestselling Might and Magic game series.