Daniel James | |
|---|---|
 Daniel James at the Game Developers Conference in 2011 | |
| Born | 1971 (age 50–51) |
| Occupation | Video game developer |
| Known for | Three Rings Design |
| Website | djames |
Daniel James (born 1971, London), is a British-Canadian video game developer based in San Francisco. He is a co-founder and CEO of Three Rings Design, the company behind the MMOGs Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates , Bang! Howdy , Whirled and Spiral Knights .
James was born in 1971 in London, the only child of Allan James, a filmmaker who worked on titles such as Out of Africa and Superman , and Hope James, an interior designer and art teacher. James attended Holland Park School and Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, and got involved with MUDs early, playing Essex MUD at the age of 12, in 1982. While still at university, he worked as a god on Avalon: The Legend Lives and co-founded the Avalon dial-up service in 1990, moving services to the internet in 1994, the same year that he graduated from the University of Leeds, with a degree in Computer Science and Philosophy. In 1995, he founded another company, Sense Internet. In 1998, he moved to the United States to work for Sierra Online, as a designer on Middle-earth Online.
While in the United States, he met Michael Bayne and they founded Three Rings Design to create Puzzle Pirates . It was launched in 2003. It has been followed by Bang Howdy , Whirled , Corpse Craft and Spiral Knights , in partnership with SEGA. In March 2011 Three Rings announced a partnership with the BBC to create an online game based on Doctor Who.
He is a member of the IGDA Online Games SIG, and a frequent speaker or moderator at industry conferences such as E³, GDC, and the Austin Games Conference.
According to ICANN's WhoIs [1] James & Three Rings Design are the registrant for the website of The First Church of the Grey Goo. The site proclaims and praises the inevitability of nanomachines replacing mankind as "prophesied" by Bill Joy.
It is unclear whether this site is an attempt at humor, earnest, or related to an upcoming or unreleased video game. Registration was on February 16, 2000 and expires in 2016. There have been no changes to the site since its first archiving by the Wayback Machine on June 25, 2001. On February 11, 2020 the site's domain information has been updated, and expires in 2022.
A MUD is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is a nonprofit professional association whose stated mission is to "support and empower game developers around the world in achieving fulfilling and sustainable careers."
I Love Bees was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2. The game was created and developed by 42 Entertainment. Many of the same personnel had previously created an ARG for the film A.I. titled The Beast. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft, Halo 2's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time.
Raphael "Raph" Koster is an American entrepreneur, game designer, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Koster is widely recognized for his work as the lead designer of Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies. From 2006 until 2013 he worked as the founder and president of Metaplace producing a Facebook game platform.
John Wick is an American role-playing game designer best known for his creative contributions to the tabletop role playing games Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea. He self-published Orkworld under the Wicked Press banner, and later co-founded the Wicked Dead Brewing Company with Jared Sorensen. His games under that company include Cat, Schauermärchen, Enemy Gods, and Thirty. He has won the Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Game and Best Collectible Card Game twice.
Three Rings Design, Inc. was an online game developer that was founded on March 30, 2001, by Daniel James and Michael Bayne. The company was named in honor of the Three Rings of the Elven-kings in Tolkien mythology.
The Coles is a colloquial term referring to Corey Cole and Lori Ann Cole, a husband and wife team who are both video game designers. While they are most well known working together designing the Quest for Glory series, both are notable separately for designing games and game engines independently of each other.
Robert Bates is an American computer game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocom's dissolution in 1989, Bates co-founded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. Notable games that he has designed, written, or produced include Unreal II (2003), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Eric the Unready (1993), listed as Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World magazine and also included on the 1996 list of "150 best games of all time". In 1998 he wrote the award-winning game Quandaries for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design and development in works such as the 2001 book Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is commonly used as a game design textbook in college courses. From 2011–2014, Bates was Chief Creative Officer for External Studios at Zynga. He continues to work as an independent consultant with various publishers in the games industry.
Mike Selinker is an American game designer, puzzle maker, and the founder and president of Lone Shark Games.
Bang! Howdy is an online free-to-play, hybrid turn based and real time strategy game created by American company Three Rings Design. It was originally released on December 1, 2006 after public beta testing by Grey Havens, a non-profit organization founded by several former employees of Three Rings. In 2008, the game reached a milestone of 500,000 players as reported on Three Rings' website.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock is an American computer and video games industry analyst, best known for his work on subscription tracking of massively multiplayer online games via his website MMOGCHART.COM.
Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands is a roleplay-focused, text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) released on September 9, 1997. It was published by Achaea LLC, now known as Iron Realms Entertainment. Achaea is operated by collecting the revenue through a microtransaction system, which allows payment for the acquisition of in-game benefits.
Puzzle Pirates is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Three Rings Design. The player takes the role of a pirate, adventuring on the high seas and pillaging money from roaming enemy ships. The mechanics of Puzzle Pirates are driven by puzzles. For example, to effectively sail a ship, players must play puzzle games representing work at the sails for speed, pumping bilge water to remove it from the ship, and carpentry to fix any damage the ship may take.
Derek K. Smart is an American video game designer. He is the president and lead developer of 3000AD, Inc., an indie game development company based in Aventura, Florida. In addition he is the president of and investor in the video game development company Quest Online. Smart is an independent video game designer and software developer, and the creator of several video game series.
Whirled was a virtual world website and video game created by Three Rings Design. Its Open Beta stage was announced at the Game Developers Conference in 2007, remaining public until its shutdown in April 2016. It made use of Adobe Flash as an applet embedded into the website while also having pages of HTML and JavaScript in a sidebar to allow players to manage their friends list and browse various categories of user-generated content. The concept is comparable to the virtual worlds in the PlayStation 3 game Home and Second Life, while also incorporating aspects of feed-based social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It pushed to make nearly all content user-created, mainly with its approach to creative accessibility using Flash's affinity for 2D vector graphics and various web compatibilities to make it very simple for players to upload a wide variety of content using simple, conventional file formats. Some examples of this include uploading PNG files to create in-game objects, and MP3 files to create a music playlist for a player's room.
David Sirlin is an American game designer and fighting game player.
Spiral Knights is a massively multiplayer online game created by Three Rings Design and now owned by Grey Havens. The free-to-play, Java-based game was released in 2011 and is still updated occasionally.
Elonka Dunin is an American video game developer and cryptologist. Dunin worked at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri from 1990–2014, and in 2015 was Senior Producer at Black Gate Games in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and was one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. As of 2020 she works as a management consultant at Accenture.
Avalon: The Legend Lives is a text-based online multi-player role-playing game world that was first released on 28 October 1989 at the gaming convention Adventure 89. It has maintained a continuous on-line presence with consistent and intact persona files and player history since the late 1980s, rendering it the longest continuously running on-line role-playing game in history.
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to Daniel James . |