Early Innovations
From 2006 to 2018, Spencer Striker was co-founding interdisciplinary academic programs, serving as founding creative director of a venture-backed Silicon Valley game studio, producing Webby Award-winning web series, and prototyping interactive stories years before today's tools made that work accessible. The through-line across all of it is a conviction that digital media can teach, and a refusal to wait for the technology to catch up. The team leadership, production craft, and design instincts forged across these projects drive everything Spencer Striker Digital Learning makes today.
GameZombie TV (2007-2012)
An award-winning original web video series and student-powered game media studio, founded at Indiana University and expanded to the University of Wisconsin. Over five years, GameZombie produced more than 500 original videos, earned press credentials at 20 international conferences including GDC, E3, CES, PAX, and Comic-Con, and built an audience of over 10 million global views across official partnerships with YouTube, Dailymotion, and Metacafe. The developer interview series logged over 200 exclusives with names including Todd Howard of Fallout, Peter Molyneux of Fable, and Cliff Bleszinski of Gears of War. GameZombie was also the foundation of Spencer's doctoral research on production-focused, interest-driven learning, and evolved into the centerpiece of the Media Arts and Game Development Program at UW-Whitewater.
TechZombie TV
A technology interview series produced live from the classroom at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's Media Arts and Game Development program, where leading digital thinkers from around the world Skyped directly into Spencer's classes. Guests included Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, Wired co-founder John Battelle, MIT media scholar Sherry Turkle, behavioral economist Dan Ariely, Wired senior writer Steven Levy, media critic Siva Vaidhyanathan, and futurist Kevin Kelly, among others. Covered by Inside Higher Ed.
Media Arts & Game Development Program (2010)
Spencer co-founded one of the first interdisciplinary academic programs in the country dedicated to creative media production and game design, at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The program grew directly out of the GameZombie TV studio model, turning a student-powered production operation into a formal degree pathway and giving undergraduates real industry experience as its core curriculum. It became a case study presented at EDUCAUSE, the Games Learning and Society Conference, and HASTAC.
Twisted Cargo | Madefire Motion Book (2015, 2017)
A post-apocalyptic digital graphic novel built on the proprietary Madefire MotionBook platform for iPad Pro, combining motion effects, parallax, panorama, interactivity, sound design, and an original score into a single immersive reading experience. Originally designed and premiered at UAE Innovation Week 2015 and published internationally on the Madefire platform in 2017, Twisted Cargo explored the expressive possibilities of motion comics years before AI animation made that kind of production accessible to independent creators. Presented at Spencer Striker's talk at UAE Innovation Week under the title "A Next Gen Digital Graphic Novel."
Conscribo | A Tale of Ancient Rome (2018)
The original narrative prototype that seeded the entire History Adventures series, following Duro, a Roman legionary navigating life and duty in the 2nd century CE. Built as an interactive iPad app and premiered at Step Conference Dubai in 2018, Conscribo proved that immersive, character-driven historical storytelling could work on mobile and established the design language, narrative approach, and production methodology that Empires & Interconnections, Revolutions & Industrialization, and every History Adventures installment since has built on. It also won the Dubai Smartpreneur 2.0 Competition in 2017 during its development phase.
Galxyz | Intergalactic Science Adventure (2013-2015)
As Founding Creative Director, Spencer Striker took Galxyz from a concept pitch to a fully realized Silicon Valley startup, raising $4 million in Series A funding from Relay Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective. The studio built an ambitious narrative-driven science adventure game for mobile, developed in partnership with Filament Games and a summer internship cohort from Carnegie Mellon, and premiered a gameplay demo at the United Nations in 2014. Covered by Bloomberg Businessweek, Recode, and EdSurge, Galxyz was one of the most prominent EdTech startups of its moment, and the team-building and complex product experience it demanded shaped every production that followed.