Michael Gray is a game designer who rose to become the senior director of product design and later the senior director of new product acquisition at Hasbro. He used to work in advertising and data processing for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the largest newspaper in the U.S. state of Minnesota. He also reviewed a few games for the newspaper. Although he used to play chess in high school and play bridge in college for money, he didn't start working in the field of games until 1977 when he was essentially asked to design a few computer games for a job interview. In 1978, he started working for Milton Bradley and designed 36 games for them in three years. He was then lured away from Milton Bradley to work for TSR when he met Gary Gygax at the New York Toy Fair. At TSR he worked in the fields of game design, marketing, and book acquisitions. He left TSR to return to Milton Bradley and Hasbro. He hasn't been responsible for designing any board games in the early 1990s as he is now responsible for helping other Hasbro game designers.

Mr. Gray frequently travels to the game fairs in Essen, Nuremberg, and London and to Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends. He owns hundreds of card games and is also a long-time friend of game designers James M. Ward, Reiner Knizia, and Wolfgang Kramer. He is quoted as saying that game companies sell "togetherness in a box".