Stainless Steel Studios Enlists Starcraft Expert Damon "Stratus" Gauthier
New multiplayer game balancer to contribute to Empire Earth, the next generation of real-time strategy games.
January 18, 2001 - Stainless Steel Studios Enlists Starcraft Expert Damon "Stratus" Gauthier
New multiplayer game balancer to contribute to Empire Earth, the next
generation of real-time strategy games.
Stainless Steel Studios Interactive (SSSI), developer of strategy games for
the new millennium, has announced the addition of a new game balancer to the
Empire Earth™ development team. Damon "Stratus" Gauthier has joined SSSI
to help balance the multiplayer portion of the game. He comes to the
company after working on the Empire Earth Multiplayer Strike Team, a devoted
group of RTS gamers who are contributing their considerable expertise to the
project. Damon's extensive experience in real-time strategy gaming will
have an enormous impact on the quality of the multiplayer-side of Empire
Earth.
Though he has played numerous real-time strategy games, Damon is most active
in the Starcraft® community where he is known by the handle "Stratus". He
began playing RTS games in 1994 with the release of the original
Warcraft®, and first gained notoriety playing Warcraft 2. In the first
two seasons of the Solid Gold Warcraft League, he racked up two 2nd Place
finishes in the Singles Competition and a 1st Place in the Team Competition.
He also maintained a top 5 team ranking on Case's Ladder. After becoming
the highest ranking ProZerran player of Starcraft's Season 2, Damon placed
4th in the Brood War world championships on Battle.net. He also led Team
Canada to victory over Team USA in the Canada vs. USA Starcraft: Brood War
Tourney in 1999. Damon has contributed to several web-based Starcraft
strategy guides and he participated in the Beta test of Starcraft: Brood
Wars.
Damon, a native of Victoria, British Columbia, is taking a semester off from
college to help play balance Empire Earth's large multiplayer component,
paying particular attention to the game's future Epochs. "I'm really
enjoying playing Empire Earth," he says, "I like that I don't have to
micromanage my economy, so I can concentrate on the battles." Though he has
been considering a career in law enforcement, Damon's current position has
inspired him to contemplate staying in the gaming industry as a game
designer.
Stainless Steel Studios, Inc., headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is
a game design and development organization. Founded in 1998 by Rick
Goodman, lead designer and creator of Microsoft's® Age of Empires ®,
SSSI will produce advanced real-time strategy titles for the new millennium.
Goodman was the winner of the 1998 Computer Game Developer Conference's
'Annual Achievement Award for Game Design and Development'. The company's
first title, Empire Earth, a sprawling historical epic covering 500,000
years of human history, is being published by Sierra Studios.