Gregory McLeod

Gregory McLeod, mainly known by the alias Cleod9, is a Flash game designer, programmer and composer. He is the founder and director of the Flash-dedicated indie company and website McLeodGaming, and he is the lead administrator of the McLeodGaming Forums. He is mostly known as the creator of the Super Smash Flash series, a series of non-profit Flash fighting fan games, based on the Super Smash Bros. series, which have been largely well received by the critics and fans alike, so much to the point of building a gaming community of their own.

Early works on McLeodGaming
Originally, Cleod9 was a maker of games for the TI-83 Plus calculator. His first major game was called RPG, and was published on the early website. During his early high school years in 2003, Cleod9 developed a great admiration to Flash animations and eventually learned to make his own Flash movies series like Animus, School, Munchies, and A Super Mario World. After founding his site McLeodGaming, Cleod9 now had such a large amount of Flash animations that he decided to work on his first big game project, although he had made games previously, like Pong, The Cell, and Adivina La Película.

Work with the Super Smash Flash series
In 2006, Cleod9 began working on a Sonic fan game in flash, in which the player fought as Blade on a stage that one day would become Emerald Hill Zone. Being a big fan of the Super Smash Bros. series, and noticing the similarities of his fan game with another old fan game called Super Smash X, Cleod9 began reworking his project into a full-fledged Smash Bros. fan game. He initially referred to it as a flash Smash project, which would be more complete than Super Smash X, possessing a full plethora of playable characters and game modes. After four months of hard work and intense flash testing, he finished the project he later crowned as Super Smash Flash, a game that was initially well-received for its wide-content of game modes and characters but harshly criticized for its dull gameplay. Nonetheless, Super Smash Flash was so successful that Cleod9 decided to make a sequel properly called Super Smash Flash 2. It would be based on the whole Super Smash Bros. series, more specifically to Super Smash Bros. Brawl and would include new characters, stages, online capability, new game modes, and more. The game, much like SSF, has received multiple demo updates since the demo's first release in late 2007. The game got revamped in 2010 and got started anew to change its old Macromedia Flash Player 8 engine to the newer Adobe Flash Player 10 engine with support from ActionScript 3; from this point onwards, SSF2 would be called a reboot to SSF, rather than a sequel.

Cleod9 is also the administrator of McLeodGaming Forums, a place where the Super Smash Flash 2 discussion takes place, as well as discussion of other topics. Many people wanted to base things in Super Smash Flash 2 on Cleod9, like the storyline. Cleod9, though, stated that he does not want to be represented in Super Smash Flash 2 at all.

Yeah Jam Fury co-development
In 2012, Cleod9 served as the main programmer of a co-developed game between McLeodGaming and World Entertainment Studios (formerly Willy World Entertainment) called Yeah Jam Fury a puzzle-platform game where the player has to switch between the three eponymous characters, each with different and unique abilities, to reach the mango at the end of the levels. It was his first game released in 6 years, following the original Super Smash Flash, not counting the SSF2 demos. The game was released on the Flash portal website, Newgrounds, where the original SSF is also available; it received moderately positive reviews.

On October 25, 2017, it was announced Yeah Jam Fury: U, Me, Everybody!, a follow-up that was released exclusively on Steam on December 15, 2017.

Future
Although it has not been decided what exactly is to come after SSF2, Cleod9 himself said that McLeodGaming is an official company and therefore it's very likely that games will continue to be produced.