Since I was a kid, I’ve made games. In seventh grade, I wrote a paper RPG called ‘In Quest of the Star Lord’ with my sixth-grade neighbor (the CoCo game by the same name was inspired by it). Together, we managed to convince a local newspaper to write a front-page article about it and our ambitious plans to publish and sell it ourselves (which didn’t actually happen).
But then I started programming. I wrote my first actual computer game on the typewriter. Called ‘Beyond the Silvered Pane’ and based on a choose-your-own-adventure module I owned, the code lived on a stack of paper until I took it to a local store and tried to get it to run on a display model of whatever computer I could find.
I saved up enough to buy a Color Computer from Tandy (Radio Shack). My first real game on the CoCo was an adventure game called Demon Cross, and it won a programming contest in one of the CoCo magazines of the time. That spurred me on to start writing professionally, so inspired by a Dungeons and Dragons module I created for an inter-school tournament called ‘Castle of the Creator’, I wrote the Hall of the King Trilogy, a six-disk adventure game, for Prickly-Pear Software.
In college, I started my own company called Sundog Systems. I wrote and released the following games under that label.
- Dragon Blade (re-released, originally through Prickly Pear)
- Champion (re-released, originally through Mark Data)
- Hall of the King Trilogy (re-released, originally through Prickly Pear)
- White Fire of Eternity (re-released, originally through Saguaro Software)
- Kung-Fu Dude
- In Quest of the Star Lord
- Warrior King
- Kyum-Gai: To be Ninja (RS-DOS and OS-9)
After college, I joined Legend Entertainment Company. There, I designed the following games.
- Frederik Pohl’s Gateway (with Mike Verdu and Michael Lindner)
- Gateway 2: Homeworld (with Mike Verdu)
- Death Gate
- The Wheel of Time
- Unreal 2 (with Mike Verdu)
After that, I designed games with a number of different companies, both as an employee and contractor.
- Star Trek Online
- Rat Race
- Don’t Forget the Lyrics
- Usagi Yojimbo: The Way Of The Ronin
- Ravenshire Castle
- Crystal Casters
- Glee Forever!
Now I teach and write, and I am on the lookout for my next opportunity to make more great games.
The Mysterium 