Funavision, Inc.'s mission is to create fun and engaging video games and powerful development technology. It is founded on a deep understanding of what is compelling to game players and what game technology is needed by game developers.

Management Staff

Sam Hart

Studio Head (CVTL)

Sam Hart has been a video game industry aficionado for thirty years. He has written many documents and articles on the video game industry and his work has been quoted in several books and online articles. In 1995 he began work on a web based documentation project called “A Brief History of Home Video Games”. In it, he laid down definitions for various industry taxonomies including game and console generational classifications. These classification systems are widely used today in various video game publications online and in print. Much of his work on this project was later used to form the foundation of video game articles on community documentation websites like Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project.

Sam has also been a part of several video game related projects over the last twenty years. In the mid 1980s, he wrote video game articles for various computer magazines and ran a computer game programmer hobbyist group.

In 1997, he founded Tux4Kids, a not-for-profit group dedicated to producing cross-platform educational video games. While heading up Tux4Kids, he personally developed several different educational games, and lead the development of many others. At Tux4Kids, Sam lead and managed a distributed team of volunteers, developers, game designers and artists which numbered over 200 individuals at its peak. While at Tux4Kids, Sam worked on alliances with computer companies, video game companies, and non-profit groups. He negotiated a major donation of computer hardware and server hosting from Sun Microsystems, a roll out of educational game infrastructure with a school district in Georgia, and partnerships with the Open Source Educational Foundation and Debian Jr. projects.

Sam has been a contributor to several cross-platform, open-source video game APIs including SDL, Simple DirectMedia Layer, which has been used in a large number of commercial video games including Quake 3 Arena, Sim City 3000, and Unreal Tournament.

Additionally, Sam has spent fifteen years in the computer industry in diverse mix of roles including system administration, software development and design, web design, operating system development, and specification writing.

Glen Smith

Audio Rockstar

Work with Funavision is Glen's opportunity to converge a life-long passion for music, a career in technology, and a love of games and puzzles.

From a very young age, it was obvious that music was destined to be an enduring passion. He enjoyed listening to an eclectic mix of musical styles. He learned the basics of music theory and piano playing at the age of six, but just wasn't compelled by the Thompson instructional series. He resumed instrumental education at 12 when he bought his first guitar for $6 (the exact amount Mike Joson needed to buy a Melody at a garage sale). He quickly moved on to electric guitar. He was fascinated by various effects for the guitar (and built a few from Radio Shack parts), a fascination that was a primary motivation for selection of electrical engineering as a career path, in the hopes of ending up designing some sort of signal processing equipment.

Such work opportunities were never available at the right time and place, so Glen's twenty year career as an engineering and software professional has been spent developing products and applications for quite different domains, including industrial instrumentation & controls, data acquisition, financial services, and OS distribution maintenance. Prior to the inception of Funavision, his efforts combining music and technology have been strictly in the realm of passionate hobby.

He has also been fascinated by logic/math puzzles and strategy games from earliest memory. (During the 19mumblemumbles, he participated in tournament play and was ranked by the United States Othello Association. He is a long-time enthusiast of PC-based casual games. (Leather Goddesses of Phobos was one early favorite.)

Michael Schultheiss

Infrastructure Guru

Michael Schultheiss has worked in the computer industry for nearly twenty years in a number of different capacities including software development and design, server/infrastructure design and hosting, operating system design, and system administration.

Michael has been the President of the 501(c)(3) Central Indiana Linux Users Group (CINLUG), an organization with over 200 members, for 8 years. He is also the co-founder and co-leader of the Indiana Ubuntu Local Community Team (IN LoCo), an organization with over 60 members. He manages the infrastructure for these groups as well as organizes their events.

Michael also is a Debian Developer, part of the Debian Project, an organization which produces the Debian Operating System. His roles there include development and packaging of several software projects, as well as sitting on the board of Software in the Public Interest (SPI), a 501(c)(3) organization which manages the resources of numerous Free/Open Source Software projects including Debian, PostgreSQL, OpenOffice.org, and Gallery.

Michael has a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science from Purdue University.