He is the designer of the award-winning games Cloud, Flow, Flower, and Journey, co-founder of Thatgamecompany as well as an advisor for Annapurna Interactive.

[1] Chen is from Shanghai, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science with a minor in digital art and design.

He moved to the United States, where he earned a master's degree from the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division.

The company signed a three-game deal with Sony Computer Entertainment, and has sold Flow, Flower, and Journey through the PlayStation Network.

[4] Although Chen was interested in art and drawing as a young child, his father influenced him towards computers, entering him in programming contests from when he was 10 years old.

[4] He earned a degree in Computer Science & Engineering in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which due to his background in computers he found "quite easy",[4] but describes himself as spending much of his time there teaching himself digital art and animation, and later did a minor in digital art and design at Donghua University.

[8] Chen went to the United States to earn a master's degree in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

[3] Their first game, which won a grant of twenty thousand dollars from USC to produce,[9] was Cloud, released in 2005, which "focuses on a young hospital patient who soars in his mind despite being trapped indoors".

[11] The game involves the player guiding an aquatic microorganism through various depths of the ocean, consuming other organisms and evolving in the process.

[16] Chen was the creative director in charge of the game, while Santiago was the producer and Clark was the lead designer.

[19] He decided on a "nature" theme early in the development process, saying that he "had this concept that every PlayStation is like a portal in your living room, it leads you to somewhere else.

[26] Chen plays a wide variety of video games, but he names his greatest influences as Katamari Damacy, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

[7] As he was raised in China and works in America, Chen feels that he cannot fully relate to either culture as a game designer.

He felt, though, that it was important to the industry and medium as a whole to create games that provoked different emotional responses in the player than just excitement or fear.

[27] Chen believes that for video games to become a mature medium like film, the industry as a whole needs to create a wide range of emotional responses to their games, similar to how film has thriller, romance, and comedy genres based on the emotions they provoke.