Meet the Magnopians: Dana Dispenza
Dana Dispenza has spent more than 30 years building experiences that audiences believe in, first with explosives and then with code. Dana started out as a shop kid at special effects house B&B Effects, grew into a licensed pyrotechnician and IATSE Local 44 member, and worked on films including The Mask, Tales from the Crypt, From Dusk Till Dawn, The X-Files, and Con Air. In 1997, a summer QA job at Acclaim Studios Austin turned into a three-decade career in games, with credits including Turok 2, South Park, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, Joint Operations, Lost Planet 3, and Panda Pop, at studios including Acclaim, Sony PlayStation, Disney, Capcom, and Tic Toc Games. Along the way, Dana earned a patent at Disney for using images to generate gameplay content. Today, as Director of Design at Magnopus, Dana leads the US design team, bringing a career spent between physical and digital worlds to a studio built at exactly that intersection.
Tell us about your role at Magnopus!
I lead and mentor the entire design team at Magnopus US. That covers a lot of ground: creative directors, game designers, experience designers, product designers, UX designers, creative technologists, and mechatronics. That last one brings me full circle back to the effects shop.
My job is to set the bar for quality and make sure every one of those sub-disciplines is pulling toward the same experience, whether it lives on a screen, in a headset, or in a physical space.
The part I love most is watching designers grow into what they're great at.
What three skills are essential for anyone in your role?
Design thinking. We're a team with a lot of different flavors of design, but it all comes back to the same way of approaching a problem. In its simplest form: understand the audience, build it rough, test it, and refine it until it feels like magic. It's the same loop I learned in the effects shop and refined in games, and it's what ties our whole team together.
Strategic vision and alignment. Knowing where we're going and getting everyone pointed there. A big part of that is evangelizing design and best practices across the studio.
An eye for quality, and the ability to break a vision down. People might assume this job is about having ideas. The real work is taking a vision and breaking it into pieces a team can actually build, without losing what made it special along the way.
What has been your proudest/standout moment while working at Magnopus?
I've been here just under two years, so it's still early, but the highlight has been helping grow the design team. Watching designers level up and take on bigger challenges is what I’m most proud of.
I've also been lucky enough to work on some amazing projects in that time, like the “Daft Punk Experience” in Fortnite, Mission: ISS and Amazon Prime’s Fallout series, plus some mind-blowing things still in the works that I can't talk about yet.
Mission: ISS is an Emmy-nominated VR simulation which brings the magic of space travel to everyone. Since its release, the experience has transported nearly five million virtual astronauts on an unforgettable journey.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt in your career?
Special effects taught me most of what I know. As a fabricator, you learn to break a problem down to its parts, then build it back up into something the audience sees as magic. That's still how I approach design. It's also where I learned to fail fast, which I carried into games, both for building experiences and for building teams.
The biggest lesson came the hard way. While working on Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, a charge went off accidentally while another tech was prepping it for a shot later that day. I ended up with second- and third-degree burns on my hands and face, and spent months in bandages not knowing whether I'd get full use of my hands and eyes back.
Saying "it could all be gone tomorrow" sounds generic, but I mean it literally. There's too much to achieve and too much to see. So I just keep moving.
What, or who, inspires you?
I've been lucky to have a lot of great mentors. Charlie Belardinelli and Thomas Bellissimo, my bosses at B&B Effects, basically raised me and taught me to be self-sufficient.
Mat Kraemer, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Sneaky Devil Studios, has been my best friend and mentor since we met at Acclaim, and we've been talking about design and games ever since. He pushes me to be a better creator and keeps me aligned with why we do what we do.
And Shereef Morse, CEO of Tic Toc Games, shepherded the later part of my game career. He helped me pair my skills and creativity with the grit and determination of an indie developer – qualities I try to bring to my work every day.
What motto do you live by?
"Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that counts."
The first part comes from Frank Herbert, and I adopted it early in my design career. Anyone can have an idea. Making it real, and making it great, is the job.
If you didn't have to sleep, what would you do with the extra time?
More of everything I already squeeze into the margins. More time on the mountain bike, which I've been riding since I was a kid. More of my own interactive, tabletop, and puzzle game designs. And a lot more miniature painting. You can see what's on my desk at @aetherkraft on Instagram.
What are you reading/listening to right now?
I'm reading How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend by Rachel Barr. My favorite books about what I do are The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, The Gamer's Brain by Celia Hodent and The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell. Outside of work, it's pretty much anything set in the Forgotten Realms.
Musically, I'm an omnivore. Mostly golden era hip hop, but you'll also catch me listening to 80’s new wave, ska, punk, Sinatra, house, acid, or jungle. Whatever my mood wants, every day.
If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
I think I already have one. I can break down or deconstruct almost anything in front of me. It's been a thing since I was a kid, and it's been a key strength my whole career, from rigging effects on film sets to designing games and experiences. But if we're talking fantasy: teleportation. Being able to appear in Nepal or the Dolomites with my bike for a day ride would be the dream.
Tell us something that would surprise us!
I'm the youngest person ever licensed as a Class 3 pyrotechnician in California, and I always will be. I got my license at 18, granted personally by the California State Fire Marshal. They'd never dealt with someone that young applying before, so right after granting mine, they added a minimum age of 21 to the requirements. My record is safe.
