Ken Lobb

Lobb graduated from DeVry University in 1982 and attempted to secure a job in the video game industry unsuccessfully, blaming the video game crash of 1983. Lobb claimed that he applied to Atari Inc. around this time but never heard back. Lobb subsequently began working at AMD, specifically on programmable ROM.

Lobb was introduced to the management of Taxan USA via the owner of a video game store he frequented in Northern California. Lobb did not apply for a role with Taxan but instead had casual conversations with the company management about video games and this sparked their interest in hiring him, unbeknownst to Lobb until they invited him to play the newly released R-Type at their company office. Subsequently Lobb was employed as Product Manager of Taxan USA between October 1988 and January 1991,^[4] where he worked alongside Japanese developer KID on various NES games made for the U.S. market. After Taxan closed down in early 1991, Lobb was then employed by Namco Hometek until 1993, where he was Head of Product Development.^[5] The same year^[6] Lobb began working at Nintendo of America, where he worked on several games, including GoldenEye 007.^[7] While at Nintendo Lobb worked as Head of Game Development for Nintendo of America. Shortly after the resignation of Minoru Arakawa from Nintendo in January 2002, Lobb left to join Microsoft Game Studios. Lobb commented in a 2007 interview with IGN that had Arakawa not left the company he would have been less likely to leave.^[8]

A weapon in GoldenEye 007, the Klobb - aka the vz. 61 Škorpion - was named after him due to last-minute copyright issues, and became notorious amongst gamers for its lackluster abilities.^[9] Despite this, Lobb stated that it "ended up having a nice impact on me, personally".^[10]