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I’m a game programmer and author living in Brooklyn.

I started on the Apple IIe, using Terrapin Logo and playing Robot Odyssey. I wrote my first bits of code in Apple IIe BASIC when I was seven years old. Eventually my BASIC monstrosities exhausted the available RAM, and started overflowing into high-resolution graphics memory, so I learned Apple IIe assembly. For my twelfth Christmas, a Nintendo, and I knew instantly that game programming was what I’d be doing for the rest of my life. I started designing my own version of Zelda before winter break ended.

My first PC was a 386SX/16 with a 40MB drive. I taught myself C++ and started programming games using Borland’s illustrious BGI libs. I released my first shareware game – Caverns of Kromene – a bit later. It was largely and rightfully ignored by the gaming community, but it was first. I remember uploading Caverns to a BBS, watching Telex’s ZModem progress bar release my game out into the world at 9600bps.

By 15 I was working in MCGA and ModeX, using Watcom C and the heavenly 386 protected mode. The Future Crew taught me where Helsinki was, and I remember thinking that it just didn’t get any better than Autodesk Animator and a 256 color palette. I plowed through several versions of my tile editor, the Mapmaker, for DOS, and worked on some games with some friends I’d met through AOL.

I started writing code professionally when I was 18, working at a small software company up in the mountains of Colorado. It was mostly glue code and data massaging, but I loved it. Later, I helped port their DOS CAD application to Windows. I didn’t know much about Windows programming; for example, I thought MFC was a pretty good framework.

I got sucked into, and spit out by, the dotcom bubble, but during that time a puzzle game I wrote was selected as a finalist in the 2000 Independent Games Festival. I met a lot of great people at that first GDC, and eventually landed the contacts that would lead to my first article (in Game Programming Gems), my first game programming job, and my first book deal.

The first game I worked on was canceled when 3DO went belly up – and the game I worked on after that was canceled as well. My first commercial console game credit came from The Collective, on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for PS2 and the original Xbox. Since then I’ve helped to ship several more titles on PS2, PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS3 – most recently, Silent Hill Homecoming.

I don’t consider myself a specialist in any particular programming area – I like to drift between graphics, tools, AI, sound, and gameplay, so long as the code’s interesting. I purposely try not to get too into any particular technology, language, or skill set – specialization has never held enjoyment for me.

Here’s a few me-links from around the web:

Cuttlefish Industries: My company.