Bernie Yee is an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, where he advises student teams on production, design, and emerging platforms.
He has spent his career turning new technology into experiences people want to use. At Oculus and Meta, his teams created many of the early experiences that introduced people to virtual reality. These include Dreamdeck, the demo Mark Zuckerberg used to announce the Crescent Bay prototype, along with Toybox, Farlands, First Contact, and First Steps. Before that, he worked on EverQuest at Sony Online Entertainment, Rock Band at Harmonix, Destiny at Bungie, and Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Peggle 2 at PopCap.
In 2023 he co-founded Windup Minds, an independent game studio exploring how players form attachments to virtual pets through specific, believable behavior. The studio’s Stay games bring a virtual pet named Ember to mixed reality and PC.
Yee began his career as a games journalist, writing a column for NEXT Generation, and holds a law degree. He previously taught game design and production at Columbia University, where his students went on to work on Hades, Bastion, Monument Valley, and Hyper Light Drifter.
Publications:
Bernard Yee, David Sturman, and Steven Feiner. 2007. Integrating Video Game Development Experience in an Academic Framework. In Proceedings of the 2007 Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education. 28--32.
D'Amora, B., Nanda, A. K., Magerlein, K. A., Binstock, A., & Yee, B. (2006). High-performance server systems and the next generation of online games. IBM Systems Journal, 45(1), 103-118.
