Meet the All inPlay Team

Michael Zarozinski – All inPlay‘s Head Geek

Thank you for taking a few minutes to read about me, the “head geek” at All inPlay. I’m mainly focused turning ones and zeros into games, but I wear many hats: AI expert, developer, database architect/admin, release engineer, network admin, security specialist, tech support, bot wrangler, and anything else that needs to be done.

The story of how I got involved in All inPlay is an interesting one. In March of 2000 I was sitting in a conference room in San Jose California attending the Game Developer’s Conference. During the session the person sitting to my right asked a question about artificial intelligence, I don’t remember the exact question, but he started by saying “I’m a student at UMass”.

This person was Paul G. Silva, All inPlay’s co-founder and resident Physicist. I found it funny that we lived only 40 miles apart yet met sitting next to each other 3,000 miles from home.

After the session I chatted with him and he introduced me to All inPlay’s other co-founder Jeremie Spitzer. They have both been good friends of mine ever since. I worked on-and-off with All inPlay, writing the artificial intelligence for draw poker and Hold’Em and also helping out with various other projects.

I moved to Shrewsbury Massachusetts in 2003, the home town of All inPlay’s own Tim and Liz. Jeremie and All inPlay’s office soon followed and I joined full time in 2005 just before we launched Texas Hold’Em.

Since then I worked on improving the infrastructure of All inPlay and getting our first word game TAG (The Anagram Game) out the door. I’m working on lots of stuff right now, stay tuned to this blog for more details.

So there’s my job in a nutshell, from a chance meeting 3,000 miles from home to everything coming together in little old Shrewsbury, my journey with All inPlay has certainly been interesting, and I like to think a little luck played a part in everything coming together to where we are today.

Tim Keenan, Accessibility, Audio and Writer

Welcome, and thanks for stopping by. Since I just set up this blog, I guess it’s only right that I introduce myself. I’m Tim, and I’ve been part of All inPlay since its inception in a UMass dorm room in 1998. Well, it was really just a glimmer in Paul and Jeremies’ eye at that point. We’d been hanging out, and Paul was curious as to what computer games I played. I then proceeded to describe the joys of Begin, a Star Trek simulator that I absolutely loved. It also happned to be a text game from 1991, and it was single player. He was apalled that my choices had been reduced to adventure games from 10 years earlier or equally old games like Begin. Then he said, “we should make a game we can both play.” And thus the concept of All inPlay was born, although it was called Zform at the time. I had no idea that 10 years later, All inPlay would be a world-wide community with four accessible multiplayer games.

So what do I do? I’m the all around writer, editor, marketer and web guy, as long as it’s not too technical. But the most fun part of my job is the audio. It’s my job to collect, edit and integrate all the sounds into each game.

As for what I’m currently up to, I’m in the process of integrating sound into our next game. I can’t tell you what it is yet, but you’ll certainly hear it here first. All I can say now is that it will be another accessible multiplayer word game, but this one has game show roots.

Aside from that, I’m adding some useful content to our website. Hence this blog. I’m also gathering some testimonials from our players. We still need to spread the word and let people know what All inPlay is all about.

Thanks for reading.