ABOUT THE PRESIDENT

ECA President and founder Hal Halpin has been a force in the interactive entertainment industry for fifteen years as an executive and entrepreneur. The founder of numerous influential publications and organizations, he is often called upon to represent the interactive entertainment industry as an ambassador at large.

Hal has a knack for creating organizations that help unite and move forward the interactive industry. He is well-known as the founder of the game industry's retail trade association, Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association (IEMA), which served the $10 billion video and computer game business and merged with the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) to form the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) in 2006.

After managing a video game distribution business and launching Video Games On-Line, the game industry's first online gaming company, Hal formed Cyberactive Publishing and launched one of the industry's first trade magazines, Video Game Advisor. It morphed into GameWeek and then Interactive Entertainment, or IE magazine as it became the leading trade publication for the games industry. The term 'interactive entertainment', now commonly used to describe the games industry, was actually popularize by Hal to describe the convergence of the console, online, and computer games sectors.

Cyberactive also launched numerous related properties, including the leading gaming recruitment site GameJobs.com, the influential industry news outlet GameDaily, and VideoGameYellowPages.com. The company also republished the industry bible, Game Over, the definitive history of the gaming business.

In 1997, Hal formed IEMA, the key North American non-profit retail trade organization serving the needs of major video game and interactive software retailers. The IEMA's member companies-including Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, Circuit City, Target, and Blockbuster Entertainment-accounted for approximately 75% of the sector's business. Hal also started the IEMA Executive Summit, which became the must-attend industry event with the top 700 executives in attendance, and successfully re-launched the industry's first charitable organization, Games for Good.