Ken Lightner

About Ken

• Joined the Army right out of high school, where he worked in aviation maintenance with the goal of one day being a fighter pilot—however, he discovered this path didn’t really suit him.
• After getting out of the Army, the 1989 Eastern Airlines strike sidelined his aviation work indefinitely, so he went back to college.
• Graduated from Georgia State University with a degree in sociology and data analysis, but had no idea what he wanted to do with that.
• His first job out of college was working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in data analysis, collecting health statistics for epidemiologists.
• Around this time, the IT industry was starting to establish itself as an in-demand market, so he decided to teach himself programming.
• To practice his programming skills, he started to make edits to an existing game he liked to play, which sparked his interest in video game design.
• To avoid moving to San Francisco to establish himself in the industry, he founded his own Atlanta-based company called Holistic Games, most well-known for creating the game “Mall Tycoon.”
• He now works mainly on cell phone games and groundbreaking virtual reality.