USC Cinematic Arts

Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded four major game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry. Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, in Chicago, Illinois. He went to the Merchant Marine Academy and briefly attended University of Illinois at Chicago, before leaving school to pursue his business interests. In 1980 Weisman founded role playing game publisher FASA Corporation (short for the Freedonia Aeronautics & Space Administration, named after the fictional country in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup) with partner L. Ross Babcock. After starting out producing supplements for the pen and paper role-playing game Traveller. FASA later produced the successful BattleTech and Shadowrun franchises. With funding from FASA and from a Japanese investor, Jordan founded Environmental Simulations Project — later renamed Virtual Worlds Entertainment — in 1990, the company that produced the BattleTech Centers. Working with Incredible Technologies, VWE created the world's first immersive networked location-based virtual reality gaming centers.