Jesse Schell

Jesse Schell is an American game designer, author and educator who has worked in virtual reality since the early 1990s. He is the founder and CEO of Schell Games, a Pittsburgh studio whose VR games include the I Expect You To Die series and Among Us VR, and Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He wrote The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, first published in 2008.

Before founding his studio, Schell worked from 1995 at the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he became creative director and worked on VR attractions for the DisneyQuest indoor theme parks, including the multiplayer ride Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold. The summer 2012 Oculus Kickstarter campaign renewed his interest in VR, and VR became a large part of the studio's work; in August 2026 he said headset-based VR, once 80% of that work, had fallen to about 30%. In 2024 he was named to the inaugural class of the AWE XR Hall of Fame.

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited CMU ETC, INI and 2004 CMU News bios, the MIT Technology Review TR100 list, UploadVR (2015, 2021, 2026), Road to VR, Game Developer (2001, 2015), Voices of VR, the Meta blog posts, Schell Games and AWE pages, The Piper, heise, Routledge, and Crossref metadata for the four DOIs. About review dates.

Early life and education

Schell earned a B.S. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 1992. He first heard of virtual reality in an early-1990s issue of Mondo 2000 magazine, according to a 2021 UploadVR profile. He then studied at Carnegie Mellon's Information Networking Institute and received a master's degree in information networking (MSIN) in 1993; his thesis was titled "A Comparison of Networked Virtual Reality Architectures". In a profile by the institute he said: "At the INI, one of the things I focused on was networked virtual reality, because there was an opportunity to do that."

Schell dates his own start in VR to about 1992. In interviews he has described his thesis work as connected to a Carnegie Mellon networked virtual reality art museum project, an exhibit of which was shown at the Guggenheim in New York in 1993.

Career

Disney VR Studio

Schell joined the Disney Virtual Reality Studio at Walt Disney Imagineering in 1995 as a programmer and later became creative director of the Imagineering VR Studio. Carnegie Mellon describes his work there as designer, programmer and manager "on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest". Schell told UploadVR that in 1995 he found the magnetic trackers used at Disney hard to work with and proposed tracking with video instead; a senior engineer replied that the processors of the time could not handle it, which Schell later conceded was right. He worked directly on the Aladdin VR experience at DisneyQuest, which used a large headset and a haptic chair, and recalled that it "was groundbreaking in its use of audio, steering interface, and even a tactile seat."

A 2001 Gamasutra article from the Game Developers Conference describes him as a game designer and programmer at the Imagineering VR Studio, credited with location-based VR attractions including Aladdin's Magic Carpet Ride, Hercules in the Underworld and Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold. Pirates, installed at the DisneyQuest venues in Orlando and Chicago, put four guests on a motion-platform boat in front of wrap-around 3D screens viewed through stereo glasses, with surround sound and tactile speakers. One guest steered at a real helm while three gunners manned six real cannons. A session lasted about five minutes. The article gives the team's working principles: "Interactive theme park rides are not video games, not rides, but a new medium," and "No one goes to a theme park alone." The team mocked up the basic concept in less than two months and spent almost a year tuning balance, script, art and audio, using a Scheme scripting environment that could be reprogrammed while the attraction was running. Schell and Joe Shochet also published "Designing Interactive Theme Park Rides" in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in 2001.

At Imagineering Schell also led the design of Disney's online game Toontown Online. He has said that its network architecture was partly based on his master's thesis. He left the group shortly before the game launched.

Carnegie Mellon University

Schell joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon in 2002 and teaches at the Entertainment Technology Center. He has said he began teaching virtual reality classes at the university in the early 2000s and has worked on "over a thousand student projects" creating VR worlds. In 2004, as an instructor of entertainment technology, he was named to MIT Technology Review's TR100 list of the world's top young innovators. He now holds the title Distinguished Professor of the Practice. With Chris Klug he wrote "Building Virtual Worlds: Carrying on the Legacy of Randy Pausch's 'Head Fake'" for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in 2013.

He was president of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2004 to 2005.

Schell Games

Schell started doing freelance consulting while teaching, and that work became Schell Games. The company, AWE and UploadVR give 2002 as the founding year; Carnegie Mellon's Information Networking Institute gives 2004, and a 2004 Carnegie Mellon News item said he had opened Schell Games in Pittsburgh's South Side in July of that year. Early projects included Nintendo DS games and educational and medical apps. After the 2012 Oculus Kickstarter, which he recalled made him think VR "might be ready", Schell encouraged colleagues to experiment with VR.

I Expect You To Die grew out of the studio's annual "Jam Week". In a June 2015 Gamasutra post, Schell wrote that senior engineer Jason Pratt had developed a method of mouse interaction in VR, and that the spy theme came from the observation that heroes such as Batman and James Bond are often tied up and have to puzzle their way out. Two levels, a rough prototype called "The Library" and a vertical slice called "The Car in the Plane", were posted to Oculus Share for the Oculus Rift, designed for a player seated at a desk. His six lessons in that post began with "Motion Sickness Can Be Eliminated" and included "Immersion Is More Important Than Gameplay". He gave a talk at Oculus Connect 2 in 2015 titled "Making Great VR: Lessons Learned from 'I Expect You To Die'". In a Voices of VR interview recorded at the event he said "presence is first and foremost", argued that "game controllers are kind of antithetical to VR", and credited Daniël Ernst's Blocked In with the idea of a seated setting, which led to the car. The demo won Best Overall VR Experience at the 2015 Proto Awards.

UploadVR reported in 2021 that I Expect You To Die had earned US$3 million on PC and PlayStation VR and a further US$2 million on Oculus Quest by mid-2020. The ETC's list of Schell's awards includes studio honors for VR and AR games: a 2023 Webby Award for Best Social Gaming Experience (Among Us VR), a 2019 UploadVR Best Visuals award (Until You Fall) and a 2017 Auggie Award for best AR toy or game (Happy Atoms).

In August 2026 Schell confirmed the studio's first layoff in 24 years, about 10% of staff, leaving about 125 employees. He told Good Virtual Reality, as quoted by Road to VR, that "There was a time when headset based VR was 80% of our work, but at the moment it is more like 30%," that the studio had a new VR title in production, and that it was doing more "VR adjacent" work such as interactive projection for location-based entertainment. In July 2026 the studio announced that Schell, its CEO, would speak at the Games for Change Festival in New York on 21-22 July 2026 about building transformational games and designing XR experiences for young players.

Writing

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses was published by Elsevier in 2008, with a second edition in 2014 and a third in 2019. The publisher says the third edition "includes examples from new VR and AR platforms". It has a chapter on presence titled "Some Interfaces Create a Feeling of Presence". He also wrote "The Metaverse: What's Now, What's Next" for the 2024 collection Gaming the Metaverse.

VR predictions

In November 2015, at the VRX conference in San Francisco, Schell gave a talk of 40 predictions about VR through 2025. They included "In 2016, eight million gamer headsets will be sold" and "By 2025, There will be no more corded VR systems." UploadVR's 2021 profile describes a 2016 Game Developers Conference talk of 40 predictions in which he forecast combined 2016 sales of eight million PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive units, called many of the predictions "staggeringly off the mark", and noted that Schell had once expected VR to be mainstream by around 2005. A December 2025 review by heise online called his technological forecasts "astonishingly accurate", including the near-disappearance of wired headsets and revenue shifting to standalone headsets, while judging his market growth forecasts detached from reality.

Recognition

Year	Recognition
2004	MIT Technology Review TR100 young innovators
2013	Games for Change Game Changer award, which Schell said was the first given to an individual
2016	CEO of the Year, Pittsburgh Tech Council
2024	AWE XR Hall of Fame (inaugural class)