Chinese online publisher FerryGames has announced that it has hired former Electronic Arts executive producer (Lord Of The Rings franchise) and Heavy Iron (Evil Dead: Hail to the King) founder Steve Gray as its senior product development VP, where he will oversee its slate of forthcoming MMOs and 'advanced' casual games.

Gray served as senior development director and executive producer for the first two and second two Lord of the Rings titles for EA, respectively, which FerryGames notes have sold a combined 18 million units.

Prior to EA, Gray founded Heavy Iron, which was sold to THQ in 1999 and now serves as the primary studio creating the publisher's Pixar tie-in titles. Before that, Gray directed Parasite Eve for Square, and ran EA's software tools group and motion capture lab for the publisher during its original PlayStation era.

FerryGames says Gray will oversee not only its Secret Online franchise and upcoming expansion packs War of Heroes and Qin Warriors, but also its forthcoming casual products due summer 2009: the music, dance, catwalk and social network title codenamed Project Super, and massively online third person shooter codenamed X-Fire.

Said former EA China vet and FerryGames COO Wei Huang, "Steve brings extraordinary industry and product development expertise to FerryGames at one of the company's most exciting times. We are confident that he will lead our 150 talented young Chinese developers to become a world class online games development studio. With Steve onboard, we hope we can bridge the west and the east in terms of technology, game production process and business model for online game development."

[The preceding article by Brandon Boyer originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]