Marc Saltzman (Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada) is a freelance journalist, author, lecturer, consultant, and radio and TV personality. His specialties lie in computers, the Internet, video gaming, telecommunications, digital music initiatives and consumer electronics. Along with his weekly syndicated columns with Gannett News Service, Marc currently contributes to over two dozen prominent publications, reaching millions of readers each month: USA Today, USAToday.com, LA Times, Playboy, Playboy.com, Maxim, Modern Maturity, Yahoo! Internet Life, Electronic Gaming Monthly, PC Gamer, Electronic Playground and many more. Marc Saltzman was one of the first journalists to break the MP3 phenomenon in late 1997 (for CNN.com); he correctly predicted this controversial audio file format would revolutionise the recording industry. Saltzman is the author of seven books including Game Design: Secrets of the Sages (published by Macmillan USA/Pearson in 3 editions, 1999, 2000, 2001) and Internet Games Directory (Macmillan USA/Pearson, 1996). Saltzman has been an official "Best of E3" judge at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, nominating the best computer and console games, and most promising hardware, for the annual trade show.