21 Facts About Kellee Santiago

Kellee Santiago is a Venezuelan American video game designer and producer.

Kellee Santiago is the co-founder and former president of thatgamecompany.

Santiago was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and raised in Richmond, Virginia, where Santiago played video games from a young age and was encouraged by her software engineer father to experiment with computers.

However, Kellee Santiago became involved in video game design and produced Cloud, a game developed by Jenova Chen and a student team.

Kellee Santiago produced the studio's first two games, Flow and Flower, moving more into her president role during the development of the third game, Journey.

Kellee Santiago married the fellow University of Southern California graduate Mike Stein in 2010.

Kellee Santiago was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and was raised in Richmond, Virginia.

Kellee Santiago played video games from a young age, cooperatively playing them with her younger brother; one of her earliest games was Sleuth, which she describes as "simple, but so effective and so evocative" in instilling emotion in the player.

Kellee Santiago moved to New York City at the age of 18 to attend the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where she was involved in amateur theater.

Kellee Santiago focused in theater on developing new works, rather than adapting older ones, and was especially drawn towards incorporating interactive digital media into her works.

Kellee Santiago ascribes this to her father's work in software engineering and her experiments with computers, which drove her into using them in her performances as she had more experience than the others in her group.

Kellee Santiago moved to Los Angeles in 2003 when she was 24, and studied towards a master's degree in the Interactive Media Program of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

Kellee Santiago's intention was to remain in theater, but in her second semester took a class taught by Tracy Fullerton on the history of game design, which inspired her to focus her studies on video game design instead.

The game received over 400,000 downloads in the first four months after release, "more than every single person in every single theater [she] had ever worked in," which convinced Kellee Santiago to remain in the video game industry indefinitely.

Journey was released on March 13,2012; two weeks later on March 29,2012, Kellee Santiago announced her departure from thatgamecompany, not specifying what her plans were for the future.

Kellee Santiago was one of the backers of the Indie Fund, started in March 2010, a group which invests in the development of independent video games.

In October 2010, Kellee Santiago married Mike Stein, whom she met while they were both at the University of Southern California.

In March 2013, Kellee Santiago joined Ouya, a microconsole which allows the owner to be a developer in order to lead developer relations.

Kellee Santiago joined the Women in Games International advisory board in May 2014.

In October 2015, following the sale and dissolution of the company, Kellee Santiago left Ouya for Google Play Games.

Kellee Santiago described her work at thatgamecompany as creating emotional responses, in order to demonstrate that video games can create a wider range of experiences than are typically shown.