Guy Cihi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Guy Cihi was born in New York in 1957. He holds a BS in Engineering and graduated from Harvard Business School’s OPM management program. His interests and experience span risk management, statistical analysis, corporate management, venture capital, demographics, cognitive systems, linguistics, publishing, and performing arts. Guy is a devoted husband and a proud father of four children.
In 1985 Guy resigned his senior position with a consulting firm in Atlanta and moved to Tokyo to lead the revival of LTL Ltd., a distressed distributor of intellectual property developed at top US universities. The work introduced Guy to, and fueled his lifelong fascination with demographics.
In December 1999, he sold his stake in LTL and began exploring new opportunities. Not going to an office gave him time to think, and to dote on his family. It was during this period between careers his nine year-old daughter asked him to escort her to an audition for a Play Station game. Guy was sitting in a waiting room when a young director invited him to audition for a part. Several months later he was contacted at his home in New York to report that he had won the part of James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2.
Around that same time he was actively participating in venture capital events in New York and Tokyo. As he gathered information for his next business he met and befriended two successful investment bank managers. A partnership soon followed in the form of AGS Capital Ltd., an independent financial risk management and advisory business.
Guy spent the year 2000 flying back and forth between New York, Italy, and Tokyo, working with his partners to register, license and establish their new financial advisory business. Guy also made furtive trips to various hole-in-the-wall motion capture studios where Silent Hill 2 was rehearsed, performed, and recorded. Cihi's acting was later widely praised but curious fans were hard pressed to find any information about him. Cihi did not appear in any of the game's "making of" videos, and he didn't act again after Silent Hill 2. As a result, some rather exotic speculation about him began circulating among game fans (including one post that suggested he was actually Brad Pitt "slumming" and wishing to stay anonymous.)
In 2001 Guy moved his family back to Japan and commenced AGS’s business operations full time. Today his firm directly advises a top-down cross-sector correlations hedge strategy and selected venture capital and private equity investments.
In 2006, any confusion about Cihi's identity was resolved when a tech-savvy fan tracked him down and exchanged emails with him. The exchanges were later posted on several SH2 fan forums (apparently without Cihi’s permission.) In one of the exchanges he wrote, "That’s my body and soul in the performance, whenever James slams onto the pavement, it still hurts me!" He also wrote, "the Japanese directors were very talented guys. They knew what they wanted. They accepted many of our suggestions, but in the end, they called the shots."
Video and still cameras were used on the motion capture stage to assist the computer-graphics artists to better render facial details and expressions. It's no surprise, then, that the game's characters look quite like the actors who portrayed them. A photo of Cihi (posted on the AGS website) reveals that he looks very much like the character James.
[edit] External links
AGS Capital website page featuring a profile of Cihi: http://www.agscapital.com/about/index0002.html
