Luc Barthelet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Luc Barthelet (born 1962) is a Senior Vice-President of video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA).

He has been an Electronic Arts employee since 1988. He is famous in the gaming community for engaging with players on blogs and in discussion boards.^{[citation needed]} In his previous post of Group Studio Head, Electronic Arts, he was also instrumental in the development of persistent state worlds, a responsibility that included Majestic, Motor City Online, Earth and Beyond, Ultima Online and The Sims Online. Before ascending to that position, Barthelet was General Manager of Maxis where he led product development for titles such as The Sims, The Sims 2, SimCity 4 and SimCity 3000.

He has an engineering degree in Mechanics and Electricity from E.S.T.P in Paris, where he studied while developing his first commercial software. Luc's software startup was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1988, and he has worked for EA ever since, first leading the development of Paint products, then the internal development of games as Chief Technology Officer and then managing the Entertainment Studio in San Mateo.

Barthelet is also an avid Mathematica user, having created the first user community wiki (with forums) at Mathematica-Users.org, which features sculptures designed in Mathematica and realized with 3D printers, glass molds and a 5 Axis CNC Mill he built with Marc Thorpe.

In March 2007, Luc announced his involvement in a project entitled TSO-E, under The Sims Online on the official message boards. Barthelet plans to update and redevelop existing aspects of The Sims Online in the project called TSO-E. Custom content is a major point of the project, as well as a major fix to the game's economy after a long lasting money exploit in-game.

In April 2008, Luc wrote a special message announcing that the EA-Land project is being brought to an end and thanked the TSO community for their support throughout the years and during the re-engineering experiment. Luc did not provide any specifics for the closing of EA-Land except that the decision was a difficult and complex one.