About

Michael Cann was born during the spring of 1985 in the town of Shrewsbury (Shropshire), and raised by his parents in Newport (Shropshire). Ever since he was given his first Sega Mega-Drive he has been fascinated in the inner workings of software and games alike.

Determined to understand how computers and electronics work he set about at an early age with the basic programming language HTML. At-first only creating amateur pages out of interest, then creating pages for a developing gaming community.

Eventually in his explorations he discovered Java-Script and opened up a whole new avenue of software programming that had previously been unknown to him. Developing his fascination of all things digital he began experimenting with audio production using various software applications. Around this time he was given his first commercial application of his knowledge, developing a website for the law firm Martin-Kaye. Having discovering there being financial potential as well as endless intellectual potential in computing he was then hooked for life.

During this period he was taking his GCSE’s and A’ levels having done very well in both especially in the Maths and Physics departments, allowing him both his primary and secondary choices at University, studying Artificial Intelligence and robotics at Birmingham and Games Programming at Huddersfield respectively. The decision was not easy but after much deliberation and thinking, the path of Games was chosen. Ever since he has enjoyed and excelled in every aspect of games programming, allowing him to become one of the few to secure a work placement during the third year of university in the growing mobile games company RockPoolGames.

Having completed 12 months of work at RockPoolGames he continues to do contract work in flash, php, html and other web languages. In September 2006 he returned to Huddersfield university for his fourth and final year of university. In 2007 he completed his degree to get a First in Computer Games Programming and won an award naming him “Best Overall Performance on the Final Year of the Computer Games Programming Course”.

After his success at university and his obvious enthusiasm for the games industry he returned to RockPool to work for a further 12 months on the latest mobile titles. In addition to his work on J2ME based mobile games he also helped with developing some of the tools used with making the games.

After the collapse of the mobile department of Rockpool Games Michael went to work for the Virtual Worlds company Dubit in mid 2008 where he worked on several projects including a project for RealMadrid. His time at Dubit was short, but was invaluable to his education in large-scale programming enviroments and the structure of management of businesses.

Late 2008 Michael joined GameJacket in Manchester as a Senior Flash Developer and was tasked to work on building and developing the core technology of the GameJacket system. Unforuntately despite a promising start GameJacket went into liquidation after 6months of joining.

Contact him by email at: mike.cann@gmail.com
Or by MSN at: el_muppet@hotmail.com