Don Daglow | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1953 (age 70–71) |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Game designer, programmer, producer |
Website | https://www.daglowslaws.com/ |
Don Daglow (born circa 1953) [1] is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game Utopia for Intellivision in 1981, role-playing game Dungeon in 1975, sports games including the first interactive computer baseball game Baseball in 1971, and the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights in 1991. He founded long-standing game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988.
In 2008 Daglow was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for Neverwinter Nights pioneering role in MMORPG development. [2] Along with John Carmack of id Software and Mike Morhaime of Blizzard Entertainment, Daglow is one of only three game developers to accept awards at both the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards and at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Interactive Achievement Awards.[ citation needed ]
In 2003 he was the recipient of the CGE Achievement Award for "groundbreaking accomplishments that shaped the Video Game Industry."
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(December 2017) |
In 1971, Daglow was studying playwriting at Pomona College in Claremont, California. A computer terminal connected to the Claremont Colleges PDP-10 mainframe computer was set up in his dorm, and he saw this as a new form of writing. Like Kelton Flinn, another prolific game designer of the 1970s, his nine years of computer access as a student, grad student and grad school instructor throughout the 1970s gave him time to build a large body of major titles. Unlike Daglow and Flinn, most college students in the early 1970s lost all access to computers when they graduated, since home computers had not yet been invented.
Some of Daglow's titles were distributed to universities by the DECUS program-sharing organization, earning popularity in the free-play era of 1970s college gaming.
His best known games and experiments of this era include:
In 1980, Daglow was hired as one of the original five in-house Intellivision programmers at Mattel during the first console wars. [7] [8] Intellivision titles where he did programming and extensive ongoing design include:
As the team grew into what in 1982 became known as the Blue Sky Rangers, Daglow was promoted to be Director of Intellivision Game Development, where he created the original designs for a number of Mattel titles in 1982-83 that were enhanced and expanded by other programmers, including:
During the Video Game Crash of 1983 Daglow was recruited to join Electronic Arts by founder Trip Hawkins, where he joined the EA producer team of Joe Ybarra and Stewart Bonn.
In addition to Dombrower, at EA, Daglow often worked with former members of the Intellivision team, including programmer Rick Koenig, artist Connie Goldman and musician Dave Warhol.
Daglow spent 1987–88 at Broderbund as head of the company's Entertainment and Education Division. Although he supervised the creation of games like Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia , Star Wars , the Ancient Art of War series, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? , his role was executive rather than creative. He took a lead role in signing the original distribution deal for SimCity with Maxis, and acquired the Star Wars license for Broderbund from Lucasfilm.
Looking to return to hands-on game development, Daglow founded game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988 [7] in San Rafael, California.
By 1995 Stormfront had placed on the Inc. 500 list of fast-growing companies three times and Daglow stepped back from his design role to focus on the CEO position. See the article on Stormfront Studios for further information.
In 2003 and again in 2007 Daglow was elected to the board of directors of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. He also serves on the San Francisco advisory board of the International Game Developers Association, the advisory board to the president of the Academy of Art University and served on the advisory board to the Games Convention Developers Conference until it was dissolved in 2008. In 2009, Daglow joined the board of GDC Europe. [9] He has been a keynote speaker, lecturer and panelist at game development conferences in Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Between 1988 and 1995 Daglow designed or co-designed the following titles:
During the late 1970s, Daglow worked as a teacher and graduate school instructor while pursuing his writing career. He was a winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities New Voices playwriting competition in 1975. His 1979 novelette The Blessing of La Llorona appeared in the April, 1982 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.
The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. Development began in 1977, the same year as the launch of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. In 1984, Mattel sold its video game assets to a former Mattel Electronics executive and investors, eventually becoming INTV Corporation. Game development ran from 1978 to 1990, when the Intellivision was discontinued. From 1980 to 1983, more than 3.75 million consoles were sold. As per Intellivision Entertainment the final tally through 1990 is somewhere between 4.5 and 5 million consoles sold.
Gold Box is a series of role-playing video games produced by Strategic Simulations from 1988 to 1992. The company acquired a license to produce games based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game from TSR, Inc. These games shared a common game engine that came to be known as the "Gold Box Engine" after the gold-colored boxes in which most games of the series were sold.
Cryptic Studios is an American video game developer specializing in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, and was a wholly owned Perfect World subsidiary, and is now owned by Embracer Group through its subsidiary DECA Games.
The Blue Sky Rangers is a group of Intellivision game programmers who previously worked for Mattel in the early 1980s.
Dungeon was one of the earliest role-playing video games, running on PDP-10 mainframe computers manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation.
Stormfront Studios, Inc. was an American video game developer based in San Rafael, California. In 2007, the company had over 50 developers working on two teams, and owned all its proprietary engines, tools, and technology. As of the end of 2007, over fourteen million copies of Stormfront-developed games had been sold. Stormfront closed on March 31, 2008, due to the closure of their publisher at the time, Sierra Entertainment.
Chuck Kroegel is an American video game designer. He was an executive for many years with Strategic Simulations (SSI), and played a role in developing their position as an industry leader in war games and role-playing video games. His career in the video game industry now spans over 30 years.
Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball is a baseball video game (1983) designed by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower, and published by Mattel for the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System. IWSB was one of the first sports video games to use multiple camera angles and present a three-dimensional perspective. It was also the first statistics-based baseball simulation game on a video game console; all prior console baseball games were arcade-style recreations of the sport.
Tony La Russa Baseball is a baseball computer and video game console sports game series (1991-1997), designed by Don Daglow, Michael Breen, Mark Buchignani, David Bunnett and Hudson Piehl and developed by Stormfront Studios. The game appeared on Commodore 64, PC, and Sega Genesis, and different versions were published by Electronic Arts, SSI and Stormfront Studios. The artificial intelligence for the computer manager was provided by Tony La Russa, then manager of the Oakland Athletics and later the St. Louis Cardinals. The game was one of the best-selling baseball franchises of the 1990s.
Old Time Baseball is a 1995 baseball video game designed and programmed by Don Daglow, Hudson Piehl, Clay Dreslough, and James Grove. It was developed and published for MS-DOS by Stormfront Studios. Built on the Tony La Russa Baseball engine, Old Time Baseball includes complete lineups of every major league team from 1871 to 1981, totaling 12,000 players.
Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991) is a Gold BoxDungeons & Dragons computer game developed by Beyond Software and published by SSI for the Commodore 64, PC and Amiga personal computers.
Eddie Dombrower is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known as the co-creator of the baseball games Earl Weaver Baseball and Intellivision World Series Baseball. He is also recognized for designing the first dance notation computer software, DOM.
Cathryn Mataga is a game programmer and founder of independent video game company Junglevision. Under the name William, she wrote Atari 8-bit computer games for Synapse Software in the early to mid 1980s, including Shamus, a flip-screen shooter.
Neverwinter Nights was an early graphical multiplayer online role-playing game, which ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.
The Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module, commonly abbreviated as Intellivoice, is an adapter for the Intellivision, Mattel's home video game console, that utilizes a voice synthesizer to generate audible speech. The Intellivoice is a large, brown cartridge that plugs into the Intellivision's side-mounted cartridge slot; games specifically designed for the device can then be inserted into a slot provided on the right-hand side of the module.
The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) titles. The origin and influence on MMO games stems from MUDs, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and earlier social games.
The 59th Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards was held on January 8, 2008 at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by businesses and academic institutions for large-scale processes. Before personal computers, first termed microcomputers, became widely available to the general public in the 1970s, the computing industry was composed of mainframe computers and the relatively smaller and cheaper minicomputer variant. During the mid to late 1960s, many early video games were programmed on these computers. Developed prior to the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early 1970s, these early mainframe games were generally written by students or employees at large corporations in a machine or assembly language that could only be understood by the specific machine or computer type they were developed on. While many of these games were lost as older computers were discontinued, some of them were ported to high-level computer languages like BASIC, had expanded versions later released for personal computers, or were recreated for bulletin board systems years later, thus influencing future games and developers.