Anthony Castoro
CEO/Co-founder

Anthony Castoro co-founded Heatwave Interactive with business partner Donn Clendenon in 2007. He initially served as Heatwave's Chairman, President and Chief Creative Officer until November 2009, when he moved into the role of CEO. As Chairman and CEO, Anthony oversees all aspects of Heatwave's operations, aligning the visions of the creative and development teams with the business and marketing teams to uphold Heatwave's high standards for quality and marketability.

Before founding Heatwave, Anthony established himself through a long history in game development, beginning with founding his first company, Integrated Visions, in 1993 while studying Molecular Biology at the University of Texas. Anthony went on to work in nearly every aspect of game development, from game testing to design and production, before finding his niche in online games. He's led teams at some of the biggest players in the videogames industry, most recently as director of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games at Codemasters, where he lead a team that built the services and operations for multiple MMOs, including Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. While at Codemasters, he also worked extensively in the Asian market as a producer on RF Online and Arch Lords.

Before Codemasters, Anthony worked as a producer at Electronic Arts, where he oversaw production of PC game Ultima Online, which went on to become one of the most popular online games in the Japanese market. From there he moved into a role as producer in EA's online studio, where he partnered with top development teams to deliver online game experiences for next-generation home consoles, including Battlefield 2. Prior to that he held the role of Lead Systems Designer at Sony Online Entertainment, where he managed the systems design team and oversaw game development.

Anthony has been featured as a speaker at some of the top events in the videogame industry. His past speaking engagements include the MMO roundtable at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 1999 and 2000, the Austin Game Conference in 2001, the Breaking Into the Industry Conference and Resume Workshop in 2004 and the Institute for the Future's Future Conference in 2004. Sought internationally for his insight and expertise, in 2006 Anthony was invited by iPark to speak to Korean developers in Seoul, South Korea at the EU ICT Challenge about breaking into the European market. He also spoke at the Austin GDC in 2007 and the San Francisco Music Tech Fest in December of 2009. Most recently, Anthony spoke at GDC 2010 as part of the I Want Music in My Apps panel.