$ whoami --verbose ● building Hijinks High — CEO, Sackbird Studios / fmr. Technical Director, ZeniMax

Adam Hafez — CEO and Technical Director.

CEO of Sackbird Studios and former Technical Director at ZeniMax Online Studios. Eight-plus years in AAA games building the tools and pipelines that keep live-service MMOs shipping, and leading the remote teams behind them.

$ get-in-touch --learn-more Navigate to contact section Learn more about Adam's background
roleCEO · Technical Director
focustools / pipeline / live-service
years_aaa8+
Now Announced · Sackbird Studios

Hijinks High

Cause chaos. Survive the day. Try not to barf… or do.

Sackbird Studios' debut title — turn a normal school day into a crazy adventure with up to six players. Wield booby traps, hoodwinks, and bodily fluids, complete escalating dares, and become the school's worst staff nightmare. The game I'm building with my team right now.

6-player co-opPC · Steam & EpicIn dev · launch TBD
Wishlist on Steam Wishlist on Epic ▶ Watch trailer

The Studio

[ the bet ]

Sackbird Studios is a small, senior team making original games. Our debut is Hijinks High, a six-player co-op chaos game. Sackbird opened its doors in 2025; I joined that year and became CEO in 2026.

Running it is the same work I've always done, one level up. I spent eight-plus years in AAA building the tools, pipelines, and teams that let studios actually ship. Sackbird is that obsession pointed at a lean studio that has to punch above its weight.

2025studio founded
8person team
1debut title, in dev

$ cat ./why-now.md

Senior team, small footprintA crew that shipped AAA live-service, now lean enough to move fast and own every call.
AI-assisted pipelinesThe same tools-and-pipeline obsession, now pointed at AI workflows — a small team that builds like a much bigger one. AI accelerates our tooling and engineering; it never touches shipped art.
One focused betNo platform sprawl. A single original game, Hijinks High, built to be played with friends.

$ ls ./team

Rob BallantyneCTO — 15+ yrs AAA · ESO, Ruffian, Halo
Doug CarrollCCO — 10+ yrs ZeniMax Online · ESO
David WorleyCOO — co-founder · ZeniMax Online
Joe LopattaArt Director — Bethesda · ZeniMax Online · Oxide
Nate Van WyngardenPrincipal 3D Artist — 18 yrs · ZeniMax Online
Emily TurnerSenior Game Designer · ZeniMax Online

Adam leads as CEO; this is the core of an eight-person studio. Full team & bios at sackbirdstudios.com.

$ ls ./press

GameSpot Gematsu MMORPG.com Inven Global Worthplaying

About Adam Hafez

Professional background and expertise of Adam Hafez, CEO of Sackbird Studios and former Technical Director at ZeniMax Online Studios with 8+ years of AAA gaming experience.

~/adam.jpg
Professional headshot of Adam Hafez, CEO of Sackbird Studios

I'm the CEO of Sackbird Studios, and a recovering AAA tools-and-pipelines obsessive. I've spent the last eight-plus years on how games actually get made — the plumbing more than the spotlight.

I started out as a software engineer in healthcare IT, then chased the work I couldn't put down into games, where I rose to Technical Director at ZeniMax Online Studios. There I led a team of 30-plus engineers and built the content pipelines and tooling that keep live-service MMOs shipping, the kind of work nobody notices until it breaks.

I came to Sackbird for the creative independence: to build the games my team wants to build, with a few people I trust.

As CEO, my job is to keep the studio pointed in the right direction and clear the road for the team: shipping our debut game, Hijinks High, and backing the people building it. Creative independence and accessibility aren't afterthoughts here, they're how we work.

8+ yrs AAA 30+ engineers led TD → CEO

Core Development Philosophy

"How smoothly a single developer can push content through your pipelines has a direct correlation with how much content you will be able to release"
"Developing live service games is a marathon - maintaining human connections within and across studios is essential"

Key Principles:

  • Focus on iteration speed and developer productivity
  • Balance stability and velocity in live service environments
  • Future-proof development processes without premature optimization
  • Content release cycles as a measure of project health

Track Record

[ HEAD ]

Sackbird Studios (2025 - Present)

CEO

2026 — Present

CEO

Sackbird Studios (CEO since 2026)

I joined Sackbird Studios in 2025 and stepped into the CEO role in 2026, leading development of our debut title, Hijinks High — a chaotic multiplayer game now announced for Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Hijinks High key art
Hijinks High

Project Technical Director - Tools & Pipelines

2021 — 2025

Project Technical Director - Tools & Pipelines

ZeniMax Online Studios (Feb 2021 - 2025)

Leading technical foundation with focus on developer tools, pipelines, and release management. Growing and managing a remote 30+ person team across multiple time zones. Balancing long-term project requirements with immediate developer needs while establishing cross-functional communication processes.

Unannounced project
Unannounced Project

Lead Technical Artist

2020 — 2021

Lead Technical Artist

ZeniMax Online Studios (Jul 2020 - Feb 2021)

Collaborated with art and engineering teams to improve production pipelines. Mentored technical artists and architected asset management systems for unannounced project prototyping phase, including world-building workflows in Houdini.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood
ESO: Blackwood
The Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor
ESO: Greymoor

Principal Technical Artist

2020

Principal Technical Artist

ZeniMax Online Studios (Jan 2020 - Jul 2020)

Maintained comprehensive understanding of art production pipelines for Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor. Focused on improving ESO release management systems to support rapid iteration cycles.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr
ESO: Elsweyr

Content Management Engineer

2017 — 2020

Content Management Engineer

ZeniMax Online Studios (Feb 2017 - Jan 2020)

Designed and implemented asset management system with graph database (ArangoDB) and Angular frontend. Developed tools for 3dsMax, Maya, and custom Python/C# solutions to streamline production processes.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset
ESO: Summerset

Projects & Publications

[ ~/work ]

Projects

Project

Verse Nodegraph Editor

Proof-of-concept — 2026 — runs in the browser

A Blueprint-style node editor for Epic's Verse language that keeps the artifact on disk as plain text instead of binary.

Verse Unreal Engine 6 Node Editor AI Workflows React / TypeScript

You edit gameplay logic visually as a graph; the canonical .verse file is generated from it and parses back, so an AI agent and a human work the same plain-text source. Built to test the thesis from the .uasset articles. A proof-of-concept, not affiliated with Epic Games.

Try the Editor ↗

Read the write-up →

Articles

Article

"The .uasset Problem, Revisited: Epic Bet the Engine on Text"

adamhafez.co — June 20, 2026

A follow-up: at State of Unreal 2026 Epic bet Unreal Engine 6 on text (Verse, glTF, USD), and I built a proof-of-concept editor to test the idea.

Unreal Engine 6 Verse Blueprint Deprecation AI Workflows Verse Nodegraph Editor

What Epic actually announced versus the press framing, why text-on-disk vindicates the first article, and a working node-graph editor that keeps Verse plain text so an AI agent and a human edit the same file.

Read Article
Article

"The .uasset Problem: Why Unreal's Binary Format Is Holding Back AI Workflows"

adamhafez.co — March 30, 2026 · 17 min read

A technical deep dive into how Unreal, Unity, and Godot handle asset formats — and why it matters for AI-assisted game development.

Unreal Engine AI Workflows MCP Binary Formats Game Engine Comparison

Why Unreal's binary .uasset format blocks AI agents, how Unity and Godot's text-based formats enable them, and what we built at Sackbird Studios to bridge the gap.

Read Article

Presentations

Talk

"Game Tools as a Service"

Live Service Gaming North America Summit 2025

Supporting the Continuous Development of Live Service Products

Live Service Pipelines Asset Management Remote Collaboration Stakeholder Alignment

Deep dive into building scalable content pipelines, tooling strategies, and managing distributed development teams across global time zones for live service MMO development.

Key Topics Covered:

  • How content release cycles measure overall project health
  • Asset lifecycle management for live service games
  • Cross-functional team collaboration strategies
  • Adapting development processes for remote work environments
Download Presentation

Speaker page ↗ · Exclusive interview ↗

Currently Consuming

[ live ]

Articles and resources that are shaping my thinking

Fetching reading list…
$ tail -f ./reading-list — building feed…

Get In Touch

[ EOF ]

Interested in connecting? Drop me a line.

[email protected] LinkedIn →