Brent Phillips leads Lyra Studios with a rare combination of technical mastery, management savvy, and real-world experience in designing, developing, and maintaining online multiplayer games. He earned a B.S. and a M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Phi Beta Kappa honors. He then entered the doctoral program at MIT, continuing his research on using public TCP/IP networks (i.e. the Internet) for-real-time media delivery. When the Internet and the World Wide Web began to enjoy mainstream popularity in the mid 1990s, he left academia to apply his expert knowledge of network systems to these commercial opportunities.

After leaving MIT he was a founder of the Jamison/Gold Interactive Agency. While serving as Chief Technical Officer he began to dream about combining the interface of a modern 3D graphics computer game with a custom-networking system based on his graduate research. The goal was to create something the world had never seen before a mass multiplayer, real-time, 3D, persistent state role-playing game. Inspired by this vision, Lyra Studios was founded. Lyra allowed him to wed his life-long passion for role-playing and computer games to his technical mastery of the Internet. The result is Underlight, a revolutionary mass multiplayer online role- playing game. Mr. Phillips led the Underlight development team of 15 engineers, artists, and managers, personally coding much of the game. Underlight has now been in commercial release for over 6 years, making one of the single longest continually running MMORPGs ever!

Mr. Phillips has spent the last few years managing the production of a next-generation sequel, Reclamation, that will transform the online gaming industry through its combination of cutting edge graphics, innovative player-driven, role-play focused gameplay, and unmatched customer service and gamemaster support.