One of Allen’s many persuits was an intense interest in the exact height of Mt. San Gregorio in Southern California.

He received his bachelor’s degree in 1990 from UCLA.

Morhaime appears in animated form in the South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” which deals with the World of Warcraft MMORPG.

In 2008 Morhaime was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for Blizzard’s creation of World of Warcraft. Along with Don Daglow and John Carmack, Morhaime is one of only three designers or producers to accept awards at both the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards and at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Interactive Achievement Awards.

Morhaime plays poker and reached 2nd place in edition 2006 of DICE’s Celebrity Poker Tournament. In the last round, Mike faced Scott Fischman and Perry Friedman (World Series of Poker professionals), as well as Ray Muzyka, co-CEO of video game developer Bioware. After a dramatic 45-minute battle, Ray emerged victorious, with Mike placing 2nd overall in the tournament.

Morhaime graduated from Granada Hills High School in 1985. Morhaime is also a member of Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain, a Metal Band formed of and by Blizzard Employees, where he Plays Bass.

In 2008, Morhaime was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame.

As Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.’s executive vice president of product development, Frank Pearce plays a critical role in the development of all Blizzard Entertainment® titles. This involves coordinating the work of multiple teams in order to ensure that every project maintains the same polish and quality that mark all Blizzard games.

Pearce takes an active role in the ongoing development of World of Warcraft as the current executive producer, and he recently oversaw the development of World of Warcraft’s first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. Before this, he directed the development process of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Currently, Pearce is coordinating the development of the highly-anticipated StarCraft II and World of Warcraft’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Since co-founding Blizzard with Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime in 1991, Pearce has been deeply involved in the company’s projects. Games he has worked on include Amiga ports of various licensed titles, as well as The Lost Vikings™, Blackthorne™, Justice League Task Force™, and The Lost Vikings II for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness™, Diablo, StarCraft, StarCraft: Brood War, and Diablo II for the PC, among others.

Pearce holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and engineering from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Early life

Garriott was born in Cambridge, England, and raised in Nassau Bay, Texas. He is the son of scientist Owen K. Garriott, who became an astronaut and flew with Skylab 3 and Space Shuttle mission STS-9. At Clear Creek High School, he took an interest in computers and began self-directed courses in programming in which he created fantasy computer games. In the summer of 1977, Richard’s parents sent him to Oklahoma University for a seven-week computer camp. Shortly after he arrived, some of the other boys attending the camp introduced themselves. When Garriott replied to their greeting of “Hi” with “Hello” they decided he sounded like he was from Britain, and gave him the nickname “British”. Garriott uses the name to this day for his various gaming characters, including Ultima character Lord British and Tabula Rasa character General British. It is important to note that Garriott’s parents moved to Texas when he was a baby and – despite his nickname and birthplace – he has an American accent, not a British accent.

Programming career

Richard continued programming many games, often offering them to friends for free. He produced his first published game, Akalabeth (DND28b), in the summer of 1980 while working at a ComputerLand retail store. Garriott earned more than enough money from Akalabeth to pay to continue his education. In the fall, he entered the University of Texas at Austin, joined the school’s fencing team and later joined the Society for Creative Anachronism.

In the early 1980s, Garriott developed the Ultima computer game series (sequels after the first were numbered, such as Ultima II, Ultima III and so on). Originally programmed for the Apple II, the first was published by California Pacific Computers, and sold in Ziploc plastic bags to interested parties. The second part was published by Sierra On-Line. By the time he developed his third installment, the games had such a large following that Garriott (along with his brother, Robert, and father and others) established Origin Systems, their own video game publisher, to handle the publishing and distribution of his title, now available on several platforms. Origin went on to become one of the most influential game developers in the history of video games.

Garriott sold Origin to Electronic Arts in September 1992. In 1999 and 2000, EA canceled all of Origin’s new development projects, including Privateer Online, and Harry Potter Online. In the midst of these events, Garriott resigned from the company and returned to the industry by forming Destination Games in April 2000 with his brother and Starr Long (the producer of Ultima Online). Once Garriott’s non-compete agreement with EA expired a year later, Destination partnered with NCsoft where he acted as a producer and designer of MMORPGs. After it, he became the current CEO of NCSoft Austin, also known as NC Interactive.

On the 11th of November 2008, in an open letter on the official Tabula Rasa website, Garriott announced his plans to leave NCSoft to pursue new interests sparked by his spaceflight experiences.

Richard Garriott

The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 but it was SimCity that brought him to prominence. The game was released by Maxis, a company Wright formed with Jeff Braun, and he built upon the game’s theme of computer simulation with numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt.

Wright’s greatest success to date came as the original designer for The Sims games series which, as of 2008, is the best-selling PC game in history. The game spawned multiple sequels and expansions and Wright earned many awards for his work. His latest work, Spore, was released in September 2008 and features gameplay based upon the model of evolution.

Early life

Wright was born in Atlanta, the son of Bill Wright, Sr., and Beverlye Wright Edwards; his father was a graduate of Georgia Tech’s engineering school, and was an entrepreneur in the field of plastic packing materials. In the early 1960s, Wright Sr. founded a successful company, which allowed the Wrights to live comfortably in Atlanta. Beverlye was an amateur musician and actress. Wright was educated at a local Montessori school, where he enjoyed its emphasis on creativity, problem solving, and self-motivation. Wright admitted to having been inspired to create certain elements of SimCity from his experiences in the school.

Montessori taught me the joy of discovery… It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.

Wright later described himself as “obsessive” in his pursuits. “I would usually get very obsessed with some subject or area of interest for six months or a year, and just totally learn everything I (could) about it.” As a child, Wright was an avid builder of models, “ships, cars, planes—I loved to do that”, he told the New Yorker in October 2006. At 10, he built a scale model in balsa wood of the USS Enterprise’s flight deck. Wright later found these early experiences to be formative in his vision of game design. “Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models… I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation.” Wright would discuss with his father the possibility of life on other worlds, NASA, and the stars. His ambition was to be an astronaut, and form colonies in space to relieve overpopulation. His father was sympathetic to his ambitions. He was also a fan of Avalon Hill’s board games, which he enjoyed particularly for their propensity to descend into a form of rules lawyering.

When Will Jr. was 9, his father died of leukemia. His mother moved the family to her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Wright was enrolled in the local Episcopal High School. He enjoyed it for the chance to debate the faculty. During his time at the school, he became an atheist. Overall, he found the methods of the school inferior to the Montessori, and came off with a bad impression of conventional schooling in general. In 1994, he declared that he had   always been somewhat disillusioned with the educational system. Some people have said it was originally based on the idea that we’re training factory workers, so it was very important to teach them to do some repetitive task for eight hours a day. What’s going to be really exciting is when this Nintendo generation gets a little bit older and starts becoming teachers in schools. I think that’s going to make a bigger difference than any kind of educational reform ever will. In the future a lot more learning will happen in the home.

Games designed by Wright

• Raid on Bungeling Bay
• SimCity series: SimCity (1989), SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1999) (Will Wright was not on the SimCity 4 (2003) or SimCity Societies (2007) design teams)
• SimEarth
• SimLife
• SimCopter
• SimAnt
• The Sims (Wright is credited for, but did not design most of The Sims 2, and is not designing The Sims 3)
• Spore

More on WillWright

Career

Sid Meier founded MicroProse together with Bill Stealey in 1982. At MicroProse, Meier developed the game series for which he is most widely recognized, Civilization, although he designed only the first installment. Meier eventually left MicroProse and in 1996 founded Firaxis Games along with veteran designer and gaming executive Jeff Briggs. Today Firaxis makes strategy games, many of which are follow-ups to Meier titles, such as Civilization IV and Pirates!.

In 1999, Meier became the second person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. The first to receive that honor was Shigeru Miyamoto from Nintendo.

Meier is not always the main designer on titles that carry his name. For instance, Brian Reynolds has been credited as the primary designer behind Civilization 2, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and Sid Meier’s Colonization, while Jeff Briggs designed Civilization III and Soren Johnson led Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. Currently Meier’s role appears to be that of a creative director, simultaneously contributing to multiple projects.

Meier worked with a team on a dinosaur themed game starting early 2000, but announced in an online development diary on January 24, 2001 that the game had been shelved. Despite trying various approaches, including turn-based and real-time gameplay, he said he found no way to make the concept fun enough. In August 2005, Meier said “We’ve been nonstop busy making other games over the past several years, so the dinosaur game remains on the shelf. However, I do love the idea of a dinosaur game and would like to revisit it when I have some time.”

In January 2008, CMP Game Group announced that Meier would be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2008 Game Developer’s Conference.

Meier currently lives in Hunt Valley, Maryland with his wife, Susan, and son, Ryan. He met his wife at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cockeysville, where they both sing in the choir.

Sid Meier – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia