Scott Bilas
Engine Architect

While in elementary school in Oregon I wrote a C-64 game called Phoenix Duel. It was a BASIC spaghetti factory with three sprites (two for the ships and one for the "laser beam"), no story, no background, and no sound. The two players would move back and forth until one player would shoot. The screen would then freeze until the little shot made it all the way across the screen, hopefully hitting the other player (who of course couldn't move). It was a purely horrible game that never had a chance of even getting pirated. I figured game programming was way too difficult and gave up on the awful project forever.

Years later, after moving around the country, getting a nerdy degree at Iowa State University along the way, I finally made it back to my birthplace of Seattle. I went through a couple jobs, then got recruited to Sierra by my friend Jim Napier, who has this bizarre conviction that writing games is more fun than architecting Internet database systems. I've been here since February, spending most of my time either making various parts of GK3 purple or naming them after farm animals. As technical lead I'm mostly concerned with the architecture of the game engine and the number of syllables in our buzzwords, so you won't directly "see" about half of my code in the final product. Not even my snakeskin console! Ba-aaaa...