Lucas Arts Entertainment  August 1989 - January 1994   Senior Computer Engineer

 

http://www.lucasarts.com


 

FM Towns (Marty) Games

 

Indiana Jones III

The Last Crusade

The Secret of Monkey Island

 

Zak McKracken

 

 

 

Indiana Jones IV

The Fate of Atlantis

Monkey Island 2

LeChuck’s Revenge

Loom

 

The neat thing about developing for this platform was that I was developing more advanced code for the Japanese market about two years before the American market caught up.  I Converted 'C' and 8086 graphics blit routines to 386 assembly code, optimized for the 486.  Ported the 16bit voice game "Indiana Jones 4" and the Redbook Audio/iMuse games; "Indiana Jones 3", "Monkey Island 1 & 2", "Zak McKracken" and "Loom" to the 32bit "FM Towns" multimedia computer in Japanese and English for the Japanese Market.  Was project leader of a staff of two, for two of the titles while the other four were one man projects. Designed various tools and techniques including fast 256 color graphics decompression, CD handler, and various FM, PCM and MIDI data handling.

 


 

Maniac Mansion (Localization)

 



Maniac Mansion

(NES)

Maniac Mansion

(PC)

 

These were filler projects between the much bigger FM Towns projects but they were fun neverless.  Converted the Nintendo 8 bit NTSC English game, "Maniac Mansion" to the foreign languages; French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.  I also localized the IBM version to Italian. 

 


 

Bad Guys of Strawberry Gulch

 

This was another filler story game that I designed but the company was not interested in western style games at that time.

 

The goal of the game is to direct your player “Miner Jim” to find the treasure of the Sierra Madre. You play along with characters such as the Sheriff “Tin Badge Pete”, the deputy “Scardy Cat Fred”, the Undertaker “Mr. Overby”, leader of the Strawberry Gulch Gang “Big Bad Bob”, and a handful of other characters such as Bad Bob’s mother whom “Momma Bad Bob” whom runs the local strawberry stand and gives hints when you buy her strawberries.

 

The landscape contained as you can see in the map image, hills, a valley, cemetery, the town “Boom Town” with lots of shops, a waterfall and “Dead Mans Creek”, along with the “Out’O Luck Mine”, “Dutchman Mine”, and the “Good Luck Mine” with lots of mine tunnels with secret passage ways interconnecting them. Other scenic areas such as “Gopher Junction” with talking gophers and the strawberry fields of Strawberry Gulch!

 

The game was meant to be corny and since Adventure games are not really made any more it might make for a nice private project for me sometime in the future!

 


I was laid off after 4 years of porting and localization work at this company but was hired back part time to finish the last project, “Monkey 2”. It was a great company to work for.  The Christmas parties are extravaganzas.  And working on the Skywalker Ranch for the first year was great.  People try for years and usually don’t succeed in getting hired and so I feel privileged.  I’d sure like to be able to work for them again as they’re a wonderful company and hard to beat.

 

I became extremely familiar with all the top of the line programming techniques at the time as well as proper data handling and entry of said foreign language standards and their formats.  This led to other localization work elsewhere.