Graeme Devine

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Graeme Devine is a computer game designer and programmer who co-founded Trilobyte, created bestselling games The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, and designed id Software's Quake III Arena. He was also Chairman of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2002-2003. One of Graeme's trademarks is his Scooby-Doo wardrobe^[1].

[edit] Biography

Devine was born in Glasgow, Scotland and began his career working on the TRS-80 at age 14 in the late 1970s. He joined Atari at age 16 to port their classic game Pole Position to home computers, including the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe. He also worked for Lucasfilm's Games Division, Activision UK, and Virgin Interactive.

Devine founded Trilobyte in December 1990 with Rob 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 of CD-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 the Game 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 the Xbox 360. In February 2008 Devine was named one of the Top 100 Developers in the Video game Industry^[2].

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 on floppy 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^[1].