Graeme Devine
Graeme Devine is a computer game designer and programmer who co-founded Trilobyte, created The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, and designed id Software's Quake III Arena. He was the chairman of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in 2002-2003. Devine was the project manager of Doom 3 when he left id to join Ensemble Studios in 2003.
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 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 1993 horror game The 7th Guest and its sequel The 11th Hour. The 7th Guest sold 2 million copies and is credited with encouraging the use of CD-ROM drives for games.
After the demise of Trilobyte in the late 1990s, he 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 2. He most recently worked as the project manager on Doom 3 until he moved to Ensemble in August 2003.
He is also (although it is less well known) one of the forefathers of file compression, after managing to discover a revolutionary way to compress movie files so Trilobyte could fit them onto onto the game CDs (without having to have any more than four CDs — there is about two hours of movie footage in total in The 11th Hour, and bear in mind that file compression was then a lot less advanced than it is now).
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Categories: Computer and video game designers | Game programmers