Machine Zone

Machine Zone, Inc. (MZ) is a privately held technology company, founded in 2008 and based in Palo Alto, California. The company is best known for its widely advertised freemium mobile MMO strategy games Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike,[3] which have both simultaneously been ranked among the top ten highest-grossing mobile games.

Business historyGabriel Leydon, the CEO of Machine Zone, co-founded the company in 2008 as part of the Y Combinator startup program, with partners Mike Sherrill and current Chief Technology Officer Halbert Nakagawa.[6] As of October 2015, Machine Zone had more than 550 employees around the world, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California.[4]

Approximately $40 million was spent on marketing Game of War: Fire Age in 2014.[7] Along with advertisements in digital and social media, highly produced television commercials featuring model Kate Upton were created. The ads highlight Upton’s sex appeal as she leads battles in fantasy settings loosely comparable to those in Game of Thrones. The spots were introduced in the United States during an NFL Thursday Night Football game and have since been prominent during Super Bowl XLIX and other sporting events.[8][9] In June 2015, TMZ reported that Upton was being replaced by singer Mariah Carey as the face of the campaign.[10] On September 14, 2015, a commercial with Mariah Carey was revealed.

GABRIEL LEYDON

Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder

Prior to founding MZ, Gabriel was the creator and game designer of America’s Army Arcade Edition at Global VR, a leading US coin-op manufacturer and the U.S. Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. Before embarking on the America’s Army project, Gabriel was a game designer at Tsunami Visual Technologies, where he amassed deep game design and monetization experience. Earlier in his career, Gabriel also worked on various coin-op games for Atari/Midway Games. Gabriel was recently named as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2015 by Goldman Sachs at their fourth annual Builders + Innovators Summit .