(Conrad) Gordon Walton, Jr. (born 1956) is an American video game developer and executive producer who has worked with many North American online game companies, from Maxis to Electronic Arts to Sony Online to BioWare. Since 1977 he has personally developed over thirty games, and overseen development of hundreds more, working as a producer, vice-president or executive producer. He is currently Executive Producer of the Kickstarter-backed MMORPG Crowfall. [1]
Walton was born on March 2, 1956, in Houston, Texas, to Conrad G. Walton, Sr., an architect, and Rilda Akin, an artist. Roberta Agnes (Robin) Hensley and Evelyn Coleman (Eve) Lowey are his siblings. He attended Spring Woods High School in Houston, and then enlisted in the U.S. Army from 1974 to 1977, attaining the rank of Sergeant. He was stationed at Fort Ord, Fort Gordon, Fort Hood, Fort Chaffee, and Kaiserslautern, Germany. In 1977 he left the army to enroll at Texas A&M University, and continued serving in the U.S. National Guard until 1979. In 1981, he received his BS degree in computer science. From 1990 to 1992 he also served briefly in the US Army Reserve.
He played his first computer game in 1977 on the PLATO system, and published his first computer game, Trek-X, in 1978 on the Commodore PET 2001. In 1984, he co-founded Applied Computing (later called Digital Illusions) with Don Gilman, and he was development manager for both Three-Sixty Pacific and Konami of America, Inc.
Though his work had been exclusively in the single-player game industry up until that point, in 1995 he joined the growing online game industry, managing games such as Air Warrior and Multiplayer Battletech at Kesmai. After Kesmai, Walton moved on to managing Ultima Online at Origin Systems, and then at Sony Online Entertainment in Austin, he worked on Star Wars Galaxies. At Maxis, he was an executive producer on The Sims Online. He worked on the MMOG Star Wars: The Old Republic at BioWare's studio in Austin until January 2011. He was last employed at the social gaming company Playdom and started his own company in 2013. [2]
He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as E3, GDC, and the Austin Games Conference, and attained fame in 2003 for a talk entitled, "Ten Great Reasons You Don't want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game." He is also active in the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and IGDA, and has been on the steering committee of the IGDA's Online Games SIG. He is on the advisory boards for the Full Sail University, University of Texas at Austin, and Austin Community College Game Programs, while informally advising other educational programs.
Walton currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Laura Ann Miskines Walton, and children John and Katherine.
The following is a brief list of games which Walton either managed, produced, or developed:
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Doug Church, is an American video game designer and producer. He attended MIT in the late 1980s, but left and went to work with Looking Glass Studios, when they were making primarily MS-DOS-based immersive sim games, including Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II, System Shock and Thief. His colleague Warren Spector claims, in fact, that Church was the one who originally coined the term "immersive simulation".
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Mark Jacobs is an American game designer, programmer, author and businessman, and the former GM/VP/CEO of Mythic Entertainment, Inc and after Mythic Entertainment was sold to Electronic Arts in 2006 he served as its GM/VP/CEO at EA. Best known as a lead designer of Dark Age of Camelot (2001) and Camelot Unchained (2019), he also created two early MUDs, Aradath and Dragon's Gate, serving as both the designer and programmer in addition to his duties as President/CEO. He founded A.U.S.I. in 1983 and worked on a number of computer games for systems such as the Apple II.
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Sheri Graner Ray is an American computer game designer. Active since 1990, she has worked for such companies as Electronic Arts, Origin Systems, Sony Online Entertainment, and Cartoon Network, and has worked on such licenses as Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima, and Nancy Drew. She is author of the book Gender Inclusive Game Design-Expanding the Market and is the computer game industry's leading expert on the subject of gender and computer games.
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Portalarium, Inc. was a video game developer based in Austin, Texas that was formed in September 2009 by Richard Garriott, together with his longtime game industry partners, Dallas Snell and Fred Schmidt. Portalarium marks Richard Garriott's first return to the video game industry since the release of his 2007 title Tabula Rasa. The name "Portalarium," as well as the company's motto, "We take you there," are intended as a continuity and reference to Garriott's prior two companies' names and respective mottoes; Origin Systems, "We Create Worlds," and Destination Games, "We have arrived."
Starr McAuley Long is an American game developer, a long time collaborator with Richard Garriott at the companies Origin Systems (1992–2000), Destination Games (2000–2008), and Portalarium (2013–present). In 1997, Long was the original director of the early graphical multiplayer game Ultima Online, and from 2008–2013 he was executive producer at The Walt Disney Company, where he created and managed several educational games and apps for Club Penguin and the Disney Connected Learning platform. In early 2008, he was listed as one of the Top 20 Most Influential People in the MMO industry. In 2013, he again partnered with Garriott at Portalarium, where they began working on a new game Shroud of the Avatar.