"It started with my always playing video games growing up, I couldn't get enough of them. After high school I went to college, but I didn't really know what to do once I got there. Living in Holland, there was only Media Studies to really get involved in, nothing with games. But I knew I loved games, so to pay for college I started writing game reviews and discussed people's interactions with avatars and other gaming theories. A professor who was interested in teaching a class on games noticed my work and together we got a class into the University of Amsterdam's curriculum."

"From there I moved to San Francisco after winning a Fulbright Scholarship to get my masters and met my future husband. Through him I met a ton of people in the industry, including Lucy Bradshaw (who is behind Spore and the Sims games) and I was truly inspired. After getting my master's we moved to Montreal, where I connected with EA execs to help them study how people were connecting with the Wii. From that research, I was able to get into producing."

"It's a racing game for the Wii, and the first time Need for Speed has done something like this. We looked at how people played with the Wii and made it a very social game. It is easy to play too! I recently played against a 74-year-old grandmother on a press trip and she learned easily!"