Michael Thomasson

Returning in 2026: Author, Historian, TV Personality

Michael Thomasson is one of the most widely respected videogame historians in the videogame field today. He currently teaches college level videogame history, design, and graphics courses for several colleges. For television, Michael conducted research for MTV's videogame related program Video MODS. With much fanfare, Michael contributed to the Inventor of Home Videogames' publication, Videogames in the Beginning by Ralph Baer, as well as several other historical videogame texts including his own solo project Downright Bizarre Games: Video Games that Crossed the Line. Michael has written several business plans for several videogame vendors and managed almost a dozen game-related retail stores spanning two decades. His historical columns have been distributed worldwide in newspapers and magazines. He has also contributed towards or published dozens of games for several consoles, such as the Atari VCS, Sega CD, Colecovision, Atari Jaguar, Intellivision, 3DO, CD-I, and Vectrex. Furthermore, Michael formerly held the World's Largest Video Game Collection certified by the Guinness Book of World Records!

Visit www.gooddealgames.com/Staff.html to learn more about Michael and Good Deal Games!

Paul E. Niemeyer

Artist, Game Designer/Developer, Owner

Paul E. Niemeyer is probably best known for being the artist of the first Mortal Kombat game cabinet, control panel, and header, including illustrating the Mortal Kombat logo, but Paul's artwork appears on dozens of other iconic and famous games as well. The most notable are TRON, Tapper, Satan's Hollow, Spy Hunter, Wacko, Super PacMan, PacMan Plus, Professor PacMan, Demolition Man Pinball, just recently he did the sculpts for the American Pinball game "Legends of Valhalla", and a myriad of other games and prototypes in the years of doing electronic game art, including being an employee of Bally-Midway from 1982-1984. From the mid 1980's, Paul freelanced in the big ad agencies on movie licenses like Jurassic Park 2, Men in Black, Star Trek 6, Little Mermaid, Hercules, Star Wars Phantom Menace, Pirates of the Caribbean, and many more.

From 2000-2005 he was part owner of Eagle Games Board Game company, which is now Eagle-Gryphon Games. Paul designed and illustrated dozens of games and their components, as well as being the overall creative director. Eagle Games published titles like "Railroad Tycoon", "Age of Mythology", "Sid Meier's Civilization", "Napoleon in Europe", "the American Civil War", and dozens of other board and tabletop games.

After selling Eagle Games, Paul designed and illustrated many games in Europe and the US, including the very popular "Through the Ages" and the hugely successful PopCap games, Peggle and Bejeweled 2. Paul owned and ran ABYSS Haunted House, a top 10 haunted attraction in the Chicagoland area, from 2006-2014 and has recently done packaging artwork on 9 Nintendo Switch Games (Super Blood Hockey, Pigeon Dev Games Bundle, Demons Tier +, A Robot Named FIGHT, Cathedral, Rack 'n Ruin, Super Dungeon Maker, and Turbo Kid) for Premium Edition Games, and very recently the packaging art for the re-release of the 1982 cult classic, Satan's Hollow.

Paul now designs and builds props & dark rides for theme parks, escape rooms, seasonal fests, and haunted attractions all over the world. Paul's murals and sculptures are in dozens of restaurants and venues all over America. Paul has an endless treasure trove of behind the scenes stories and experiences from the early gaming days of the 1980's and 30+ years in the Chicago ad agencies.