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Irena Pereira is a game developer, UX leader and technology entrepreneur focused on AI-powered game development and interactive worlds.
Irena Pereira is the CEO of Infinite Realms. Irena is also the CEO, Creative Director & Founder of Unleashed Games in partnership with the legendary Mitch Lasky, former partner at Benchmark SPEEDRUN by Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z). The company was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, which is launching the social game, Haven.
Infinite Realms is an initiative focused on applying generative AI and game-development technology to interactive adaptations and virtual worlds based on intellectual property.
Irena is an American game developer, user-experience designer, creative director, consultant, educator, and technology entrepreneur with more than 25 years across web development, online games, AAA game production, mobile games, and AI-assisted development.
Her professional credits and roles include work associated with World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, the canceled MMO Project Copernicus, and Monopoly GO!.
In the past, Irena has held roles at Artifact Entertainment, Blizzard Entertainment, 38 Studios, WB Games Boston, Cognitive Code, Kessel Run, and Scopely, while also operating the consultancy Digital Experiments.
Irena is also an adjunct professor at the New England Institute of Technology, teaching courses including HTML & JavaScript Games Development and 2D Art & Animation.
Her broader educational activities have included mentorship, guest lecturing, and industry presentations on UX, game development, leadership, and generative AI.
Irena's professional career began in the late 1990s in web development. According to her professional history, she worked as a web developer at Bang! Productions from December 1997 to December 1998. The agency's clients included organisations and artists in fitness and music, and Pereira worked on websites for Weider Publications, Stone Temple Pilots, Seal, and Moonshine Records. Her responsibilities combined front-end engineering with web design.
In January 1999, Pereira joined the Hollywood Stock Exchange as a web development team lead. Hollywood Stock Exchange operated an online fantasy stock-trading game based on movies and entertainment properties. Pereira worked on client-side engineering and design and on advertising products for film studios including Universal Pictures, 21st Century Fox, and Miramax. She also managed a small front-end engineering team. She remained there until February 2000.
She briefly worked at Sony Online Entertainment in 2000 as Manager of Operations, Web. Her responsibilities included work associated with the merger of Verant Interactive and Sony Online Entertainment and redesigning and deploying the Sony Station and EverQuest web presence.
From March 2001 to February 2002, Pereira was a user interface designer at Artifact Entertainment, a developer focused on massively multiplayer online PC games. She led interface and marketing design for Horizons: Empires of Istaria and worked on internal game-content development tools. Independent game-credit records likewise document her work at Artifact Entertainment in interface design, technical documentation, tools development, and web design.
Pereira joined Move, Inc. in March 2002 and worked there until December 2005. Her responsibilities encompassed interface design, front-end development, monetization initiatives, and design leadership for the company's real-estate portals, including REALTOR.com. Her supplied professional history states that she also hired and managed a five-person design team.
During an overlapping period, Pereira worked at Experian as an interaction designer from January 2005 to January 2006. Her work centered on online marketing and lead-generation products, A/B testing, user research, and iterative product testing. Her professional profile attributes a 40% one-year revenue gain to conversion improvements associated with these testing processes. This figure is a self-reported professional claim rather than an independently audited result in the supplied material.
In January 2006, Pereira joined Blizzard Entertainment as a user interface designer. She had applied to the company repeatedly before being hired; in a later interview, she described her combination of engineering and visual-design skills as key to securing the position. Her role combined interface design and programming for World of Warcraft and its expansions, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King.
At Blizzard, Pereira worked as a full-stack UI designer and developer using technologies including Lua and XML. Her responsibilities included designing and implementing game interfaces, advocating usability-focused development, engaging with the World of Warcraft AddOn community, and representing the development team at BlizzCon. Her portfolio specifically identifies her work on the Inscription system introduced for Wrath of the Lich King. Independent game-credit records list her programming work on The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King.
Pereira left Blizzard in 2008 and joined 38 Studios, initially reported publicly as a senior UI designer and subsequently serving as Lead User Interface Designer. She worked there from September 2008 until the company's closure in May 2012. Her responsibilities included building and leading an eight-person multidisciplinary UI team and contributing game design, interface design, visual assets, and UI development to the company's fantasy MMO project.
That project, known as Project Copernicus, was an unreleased massively multiplayer game set in the Kingdoms of Amalur universe. Pereira worked on its user interface, including a fast-travel system called Mana Streamers. Contemporary and retrospective sources identify her as the project's UI designer and connect her prior World of Warcraft experience to her role at 38 Studios.
Following the closure of 38 Studios, Pereira established Digital Experiments in June 2012. She operated the consultancy until February 2025, providing UX, UI, game-design, product validation, and user research services. Her supplied professional record names Activision Blizzard, Mythic Games, and SciPlay among its clients and states that she conducted more than 200 user-research sessions during this period. She also gave talks and guest lectures on UX and game development.
Pereira subsequently held several studio and technology roles alongside her consulting activities. She was Senior UX Designer at WB Games Boston from October 2014 to March 2015, working on a strategic transition from PC to mobile products, IP licensing relationships, prototypes, and presentations to executive stakeholders.
From January 2016 to August 2017, she served as Creative Director at DuoFun Studios, where she worked with a distributed team on the launch of an iOS and Android game and introduced Agile development practices. From January 2017 to March 2018, she concurrently served as Executive Creative Director at Cognitive Code, working on the SILVIA conversational AI platform. Her responsibilities there included branding, product development, strategy, marketing, and participation in fundraising activities.
In February 2019, Pereira joined Kessel Run, a software organization associated with the United States Air Force, as a product designer. She worked there until July 2020. Her professional record describes her work as including mission and intelligence systems developed through lean, user-centered methods, brand and identity work for Detachment 12, strategic communications, and mentorship of a design organization numbering more than 50 people.
Pereira has described the Kessel Run experience as influential on her subsequent approach to game development. In interviews, she has emphasized rapid iteration, direct observation of users, small testable development objectives, and continuous decision-making based on feedback. She later sought to apply these practices to commercial game-development teams.
In September 2020, Pereira joined Scopely as Lead User Experience Designer and remained there until May 2021. Her work included UX design and research for Monopoly GO!, particularly player research, branding, journey mapping, player psychology, and product-market-fit methods. Her portfolio describes research that led to a revised expression of the Monopoly brand for a newly defined target audience. The game itself launched in 2023, after Pereira's tenure at Scopely.
From June 2021 to May 2022, Pereira was a contract UX Director at UX is Fine! Her stated responsibilities included scaling UX processes, developing junior UX talent, supporting client projects, and promoting psychological safety within teams.
In 2022, Pereira founded Unleashed Games, serving as CEO and creative director. The company was established around cooperative and socially oriented game design. Pereira assembled a team with experience across established game franchises and began developing Haven: Forge Friendships to Save the World, a cross-platform cooperative role-playing game centered on exploration, community building, and group play.
Unleashed Games was selected for the inaugural a16z Speedrun gaming accelerator in 2023. Pereira has stated that the accelerator provided the company's first institutional investment. The supplied material reports that Unleashed subsequently raised approximately $1.2–$1.3 million while developing its prototype; her professional profile states that the company produced a cross-platform prototype within seven months. a16z's current company directory lists Unleashed as a member of Speedrun cohort 001.
The company's technical work subsequently expanded beyond Haven. Unleashed developed Unleashed Realms, a production platform intended to combine procedural generation, generative AI, reusable gameplay architecture, and conventional game-development expertise. The objective was to lower the time and cost involved in producing online game worlds while retaining human oversight of creative work. Haven served as the initial test environment for this approach.
In September 2024, Pereira became an adjunct professor at the New England Institute of Technology, teaching in its game-development program. The supplied record lists HTML and JavaScript game development and 2D art and animation among her courses.
In February 2025, Pereira became CEO of Infinite Realms. The project grew out of technology initially developed as infrastructure for Unleashed Games. Infinite Realms is described as an AI-assisted platform designed to convert licensed literary worlds and related intellectual property into interactive environments while allowing game developers to build experiences based on those properties. Pereira has characterized the model as combining licensed IP, author participation, game-development tools, and customized language models.
As of 2026, Pereira is publicly identified as Founder and CEO of Infinite Realms/Unleashed Games. Her recent professional focus includes generative AI in game-production pipelines, intellectual-property adaptation, worldbuilding, scalable content creation, responsible AI governance, and preservation of authorship and creative intent. She was listed as a speaker at GDC 2026 on the subject of generative AI, studio leadership, tools, and trust.
Pereira's stated approach to game development centers on player-focused design, cooperative play, rapid user-informed iteration, and the use of technology to extend rather than replace human creative work. Through Unleashed Games, she has pursued games designed around cooperation and social connection. Her work with Infinite Realms extends this approach to generative AI, with an emphasis on licensed intellectual property, creator involvement, canon consistency, and AI as a production tool under human creative direction.
Pereira's documented professional recognition includes her appointment as a Women in Games Ambassador in 2022. During the same year, she served as a Q2, Q3, and Q4 mentor for Women in Games International (WIGI). In 2023, she participated as a mentee in WIGI's Get in the Game @ DICE program. Her professional LinkedIn record also identifies her continuing affiliation with Women in Games as an ambassador.
In 2023, Unleashed Games was accepted into the inaugural cohort of a16z Games' SPEEDRUN accelerator. Pereira attended the SR001 program in May and June 2023. The company's participation led to an investment from the accelerator and formed part of Unleashed's subsequent fundraising activity. a16z's official Speedrun directory continues to identify Unleashed Games as a Cohort 001 company and Pereira as its CEO.
Pereira has also received professional recognition through invitations to speak at major game-development and academic events. Her documented appearances include BlizzCon 2007, where she presented on creating World of Warcraft AddOns; a 38 Studios panel at New York Comic Con in 2009; PAX East in 2016, where she discussed game-design methods and parenting; the Game UX Summit hosted at Bungie in 2022, where she presented "Why UX Fails"; the GDC Nordic Breakfast in 2023, where she spoke on generative AI and human creativity; and the MIT Gaming Industry Conference in 2023, where she participated in a generative-AI discussion.
Her later speaking work has continued to focus on AI and game production. GDC lists Pereira as a 2026 speaker and Founder and CEO of Infinite Realms/Unleashed Games, with a session titled "GenAI at Studios: Leadership, Tools, and Trust." GDC's biography describes her work as concentrating on practical and responsible uses of generative AI in production, including worldbuilding, live operations, governance, authorship, and preservation of creative intent.
