Over the past two decades Geoff Keighley has established himself as one of the leading media entrepreneurs, live event producers and on-camera personalities in the video game industry. Whether he is hosting The Game Awards, producing the landmark 5-hour Discovery Channel series The Rise of the Video Game, or exploring new ventures such as the live theatrical production The Last of Us: One Night Live, Keighley has deftly moved between mediums to chronicle, celebrate, and cement games as the leading form of entertainment.

Sensing a shifting media landscape, in late 2014 Keighley created, self-financed, produced and hosted The Game Awards, an awards show for the video game industry distributed exclusively via streaming platforms like YouTube andTwitch.  The Game Awards is now one of the largest live streamed events on the Internet, which The New York Times calls the “Oscars for the video game world.” The Hollywood Reporter recently recognized Keighley as one of the Top 20 Innovators in Hollywood for his work building The Game Awards, which in 2021 delivered a record setting 103 million global liveestreams.

Today Keighley also produces two other large scale streamed events: Summer Game Fest, the video game industry’s mid-year announcement event, and Opening Night Live, a video game showcase event held every August at gamescom in Cologne, Germany.

Before founding his own production company, Keighley spent over a decade working in front of the cameras for G4TV and Viacom Media Networks, where he hosted and produced video game programming across Spike TV, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and VH1.  Whether it was a weekly news-magazine show (GTTV on Spike), a roundtable talk show (The Bonus Round on GameTrailers.com), the annual Video Game Awards, or even Spike TV’s live coverage of E3, and Comic-Con, Keighley established Viacom as a leading outlet for gaming coverage both onair and online.  Keighley executive produced and hosted live TV launch specials for both the Xbox One  and the PlayStation 4 on Spike TV, and produced half-hour TV specials for a diverse slate of game franchises including Call of Duty, Madden NFL, Halo, Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Uncharted and many other blockbuster franchises.

In 2011 Keighley founded his own publishing group to create a groundbreaking series of iPad apps that Fast Company says are “pushing the limits of storytelling” and “serving as a model for publishing a la carte journalism.”  Called The Final Hours, these 15,000 word multimedia experiences  give a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the ups and downs of game development at the world’s top studios behind games like Portal 2, Mass Effect 3, Tomb Raider, and Titanfall.  These  “futuristic magazine articles” (according to Kotaku.com) reconnect Keighley with his roots as a game journalist, having spent six years after college writing about games for Entertainment Weekly and penning feature stories  for Business 2.0 magazine on companies like Cirque du Soleil and internet news entrepreneur Matt Drudge.  

Keighley is a graduate from the University of Southern California.