Turning and turning in the widening gyre...

I recently formed a new game company, Mad Otter Games. We have an A plus team of super-talented game developers.

I co-founded Dynamix in 1984, where I designed and directed a dozen games over the next ten years. They ranged from 3D action games to modern and historic flight simulations. The Great War Planes series included Red Baron, Aces of the Pacific, Aces Over Europe, and A-10 Tank Killer. I had a great time working with all of the talented, amazing people at Dynamix.

I started creating computer games back in 1977, on a teletype of all things. In high school I wrote some games just for fun on the 8K Commodore PET, including a version of Mastermind in seven lines of Basic.

My first published game was Stellar 7, released in 1983 on the Apple II. I enjoyed the challenge of writing graphics and 3D code that was fast enough to run on a one megahertz chip, and fit in 48K. Later we were facing similar challenges on our first title for Electronic Arts, Arcticfox, for the soon-to-be-released Amiga.

In 1990 I started making historic flight simulations. Our first offering was Red Baron. We decided to make a World War I dogfighting game because biplanes have the best gameplay. Back then simulations tried to either be fun games or realistic simulations, but not both. I thought that was silly, so I designed a game that was fun and realistic.

One design goal was to achieve psychological realism rather than documental realism. What I mean is that historical accuracy in a simulation should be measured by how close the player's mental challenges and choices are to the historical pilot's, rather than on how many gauges the aircraft had, where they were located, etc. Statistics and data are best expressed in books and photographs, whereas games are first of all interactive experiences.


Recently I became enamored with C#, so for fun I wrote a Blackjack simulator that uses a playing/betting strategy purported to win money against a six-deck shoe. I wanted to test empirically if it really works, or if the books were just written by shills for Las Vegas. It turns out the system does work. I added a genetic algorithm that was able to optimize the tables and improve on the results recommended in the books. My foray back into programming was short-lived when I realized (for the second time in my career), that it's a mistake for me to try to program and be a designer and project director (though some people have done it successfully).

External links

Computer Gaming World selected Red Baron as the #4 game of all time.

Here's my pick for the best game designer. Just consider one of his oft-overlooked games, Cytron Masters. In this game you command an army of various types of futuristic units in real-time, trying to capture resource zones so that you can accumulate enough energy to make more units, and eventually overrun the enemy's base. The major gameplay challenge is micro-managing all of the units in your army, simultaneously, in real-time. Does this sound like just another Real-Time Strategy game? I suppose it would be, except it was released on the Atari 800 and Apple II back in 1982 many years before anyone even knew there was such a thing as the RTS genre.

In a recent article, three Dynamix flight sims make ign.com's top-ten list of the best flight games.

Project Firestart lives again! Here is a Retro Remake. Kudos to the author Eric Hogan!

If you're interested in doing world-class scuba diving, avoid the big dive boats, and instead book through World Wide with Carl Roessler. I saw things that cannot be put into words; visual scenes more surreal and beautiful than anything in any movie. And then there was the live, cageless, shark feed...

Wikipedia references

Damon Slye on Wikipedia, Dynamix, Aces of the Pacific, Red Baron, A-10 Tank Killer, MechWarrior, Project Firestart, Abrams Battle Tank, Arcticfox, Stellar 7