Aaron Archer
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Aaron C. Archer (born 1972 in Canton, Ohio) is a toy designer for the Hasbro toy company from 1995 onwards. Archer has worked on toylines including Batman, Star Wars, and , amongst others. Archer's earliest Transformers work were designs for the later Beast Wars toys, including Transmetal 2 Megatron, Dinobot, and Cheetor. Currently Archer is the design director on the Transformers brand, a role that essentially makes him the highest-ranking Transformers staffer on the Hasbro side of the business (Transformers are produced in partnership with Takara).
Archer's duties include concept design, both for larger storyline concepts (Archer claims the idea for was initially created on a Taco Bell napkin over lunch) and for the look of individual characters. While Takara's engineers are responsible for converting Archer's designs into three-dimensional action figure form, Archer is essentially the primary designer for the majority of the current Transformers product.
Archer is also well-known in the Transformers fandom for his brief stint posting on the [TFW2005] boards under the assumed name "Orson" (a reference to Orson Welles, voice of Unicron). Archer responded to fan questions in an unusually cryptic style, answering either-or type questions with a straighforward "NO" and only answering specific parts of multi-part questions (most likely due to non-disclosure issues). The "Orson's World" message board was shut down after a rival forum's administrators complained to Hasbro, apparently feeling slighted that such a valuable "inside source" was only posting to one forum (or at least, a forum that was not their own).
Prior to working for Hasbro, Archer self-published a comic book, Gumbo, with Jeff McCormack. Both attended the University of Akron, in Akron, Ohio.
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