Part Tolkien and part Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Gomez ’85 helps Hollywood and Fortune 500 companies tell their stories across multiple media platforms
You can’t hide in your bedroom and “play with your plastic dinosaurs forever,” muses the boy inside Jeff Gomez ’85. Instead, through his imagination, this lonely Latino child from the Lower East Side morphed into a globe-trotting storyline universe creator, consultant, and producer. From a gritty childhood and an adolescence of playing Dungeons & Dragons in the Queens College Student Union, he has shaped a professional life immersed in dozens of fictional worlds.
President and CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment in Manhattan, Gomez is a guru of transmedia storytelling, which involves creating a narrative robust enough to span animation, ads, films, web content, and books to video games, toys, and theme parks. He guides Hollywood and Fortune 500 companies as they incubate or expand their epic fictional realms of branded entertainment, such as Disney’s sci-fi Tron: Legacy and Microsoft’s $2-billion Xbox game Halo. The fantasy universes Starlight Runner has been involved with generate millions of fans eager to interact with that world—as well as megabucks for the companies.
