Michael Kelbaugh

Michael Kelbaugh is the president of Retro Studios in Austin, Texas. Kelbaugh was also the exectutive producer of the Metroid Prime Trilogy. He appeared in the "Developers Voice" featurette promoting the Trilogy.

By early 2000, Kelbaugh was involved in nearly all of Nintendo's bigger first- and second-party releases, working to manage and remove bugs for the QA cycle before the games shipped to retail. Even as recently as 2002, he was still overseeing testing at Nintendo's American headquarters as Testing Director for the just-released Metroid Prime.

Prime's release marked a turning point for developer Retro Studios, and with Nintendo's backing, they were able to make two sequels, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Before the release of the follow-up, Retro president and founder Jeff Spangenberg sold his part of the company to Nintendo. Two years later, Kelbaugh was appointed the new president and began overseeing the rest of Retro's work on the Prime franchise.

Trivia

 * Kelbaugh appears as a list of deceased Federation Marines on the G.F.S. Valhalla trailer video that was shown before the release of Corruption.