David Whatley

David Whatley is the President and CEO of Simutronics Corporation, in St. Charles, Missouri. He was the co-founder of the company in 1987, and has been a key developer on all of the company's products, including GemStone II, GemStone III, GemStone IV, DragonRealms, Modus Operandi, Alliance of Heroes, and CyberStrike, which won the first ever Online Game of the Year award from Computer Gaming World magazine. Whatley has also been a key developer for HeroEngine, a middleware MMO engine which is being used for upcoming games by Bioware and Zenimax.

Whatley was born in 1966, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three children to Oscie Whatley, a day lily hybridizer, and Dorothy Whatley, who ran a miniatures store. Whatley was involved in the early BBS culture, writing the FRPBBS software for his privately-owned company, Deep Pan Software. He briefly attended the University of Missouri, St. Louis in 1985, majoring in communications, but decided it wasn't for him, and dropped out to found his own software company.

A passionate gamer, in 1987, at the age of 20, he co-founded Simutronics with Tom & Susan Zelinski, initially running the company from his home. Whatley was President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board. The company grew rapidly to the point of grossing $5 million per year, and made the Inc. 500 list as one of the fastest-growing companies in the country, with offices in Missouri and Maryland. Simutronics has approximately 50 full-time employees, and 500 contractors and volunteers. Business relationships were developed with every major online service, ranging from General Electric's GEnie to America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Other partners have included Time Warner, Sony, and Universal Studios. Simutronics games were the #1 third-party content on America Online, breaking industry records with 2 million user hours per month. Simutronics' flagship product GemStone is the longest-running product line of its type in the world, with customers who have been with the company since 1988. Whatley innovated the concept of online 3D action games, developing the CyberStrike 3D multiplayer game in 1993. The first of its type, it caused ''Computer Gaming World'' magazine to create the new category of "Online Game of the Year" so it could be awarded to ''CyberStrike''.

Whatley is also the founder of the iPhone/iPod Touch development company Critical Thought Games.