The 10x10 Room Staff

10x10 Room was founded by two gaming buddies: Nick Branstator and Derek Bruneau. After meeting as students at Williams College, we kept in touch — including a stint working together at the pioneering web company Tripod — and in 2010 decided to take the plunge into full-time game development.

Introduced to Dungeons & Dragons at age 6, Nick ate up the experience and never looked back. Teenage success getting published by the Car Wars game was his first hint that game creation could become a profession. From 1996 to 2010, Nick honed his business and project skills as a software engineer, artistic director, and company officer at internet startups. A job offer to be a game developer at Wizards of the Coast nearly stole him away from the internet world in 2005, and set the wheels in motion for his transition to full-time web game development as part of 10x10 Room.

Derek created his first homebrew video game at 14, when he developed a clone of Wizardry for his Pascal class and a buggy text adventure called The Druid on his Commodore 64. In college he studied creative writing, history, and math while designing adventures for weekly tabletop RPG sessions with friends. Since then he's spent most of his professional career multi-classing as a software engineer, UI designer, and product manager, acquiring the Senior Director of Product Development achievement around level 10 while working at Lycos.