Key Profiles

Meet the sometimes infamous, occasionally notorious, and always inimitable personalities here at BreakAway.

Ed Beach is the Director of Engineering at BreakAway, managing a department of 25 software engineers based in the Hunt Valley office. Ed is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where he double-majored in Russian and Computer Science. He has been at BreakAway for 8 years; his previous programming experience included NASA spacecraft control software, wireless communications, and GIS.

However, like many of BreakAway’s employees, his love of games has led him to pursue game development sidelights outside his primary discipline of software engineering. For the past 15 years, Ed has been designing boardgames in his spare time. He has 3 published designs in the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series, including one (Grant Takes Command) that was nominated for the Charles S. Roberts award for Best Pre-World War II Game in 2001. More recently, he’s moved on to design boardgames set in Renaissance Europe. His most recent work (Here I Stand), a study of the conflicts of Reformation Europe, won the 2006 Charles S. Roberts award for Best Pre-World War II Game and the 2006 Walter Luc Haas award for best simulation game.

And so at BreakAway, you’ll see Ed dabbling in game design and project management when he isn’t busy with software engineering. He lists creating the single-player AI for BreakAway’s Peloponnesian War, designing Middle Ages scenarios for Civilization III: Conquests, and putting together one of the most complex scenarios for A Force More Powerful as some of the highlights of his career at BreakAway. And Ed’s interests don’t lie only with historical topics: he also revamped the strategic game for the Rise of the Witch King expansion for Battle for Middle Earth, is implementing gameplay systems for a serious game project for the Air Force, and even runs BreakAway’s annual March Madness tournament.