- Graeme Devine
Graeme Devine is a
computer game designer and programmer who co-foundedTrilobyte , created bestselling games "The 7th Guest " and "The 11th Hour", and designedid Software 's "Quake III Arena ". He was also Chairman of theInternational Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2002-2003. One of Graeme'strademark s is hisScooby-Doo wardrobe [http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-tri/ "Haunted Glory: The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte"] fromGameSpot ] .Biography
Devine was born in
Glasgow ,Scotland and began his career working on theTRS-80 at age 14 in the late 1970s. He joinedAtari at age 16 to port their classic game "Pole Position " tohome computer s, including theCommodore 64 ,Apple IIe andZX Spectrum . He also worked forLucasfilm 's Games Division,Activision UK, andVirgin Interactive .Devine founded
Trilobyte in December 1990 withRob Landeros . He designed the original concept and was the lead programmer on the 1992 horror game "The 7th Guest" and its sequel "The 11th Hour". "The 7th Guest" was a phenomenon, selling 2 million copies, and is credited (along with the game "Myst ") with encouraging the use ofCD-ROM drives for games.After the demise of
Trilobyte in the late 1990s, Devine joined id Software to work as a designer on "Quake III Arena" and "Quake III Team Arena". At id he gained recognition in the Mac gaming community for supporting development on the platform. He also worked on theGame Boy Advance versions of "Commander Keen " (2001), "Wolfenstein 3D ", and "Doom II ", and was programmer on "Doom 3 " until he moved to Ensemble in August 2003. Devine is currently the Lead Designer on "Halo Wars ", an RTS for theXbox 360 . In February 2008 Devine was named one of the Top 100 Developers in theVideo game Industry [http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8736&Itemid=2&limit=1&limitstart=7 "THE NEXT-GEN HOT 100 DEVELOPERS 2008"] fromNext-Generation ] .Devine is also one of the forefathers of
file compression . The game "11th Hour" made extensive use of movie footage, which required a great deal of disk space. Most games in the industry at that point were still shipping onfloppy disks , which could only hold about 1 Megabyte of data each. "11th Hour" used roomier CD technology, but there was still a limit to how many CDs could practically be used for a single game. File compression technology at the time, especially for videos which could run into hundreds of megabytes, was still in a primitive state. However, Devine innovated a way to compress movie files, so Trilobyte could fit two hours of footage, along with the game itself, onto only four CDs.References
External links
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Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
