Brian Goble

Brian L. Goble was a Monolith Productions engineer from its founding in 1994 until 2002. He is best known to the Blood community for his work as a coder on Blood II: The Chosen. The game contains the cheat code "mpscorpio" or "mpgoble" that displays the message "Brian L. Goble is a programming god!" (a similar cheat exists in Claw).

He also worked on Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, Gruntz, Get Medieval, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Tex Atomic's Big Bot Battles, No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way and Tron 2.0 while at Monolith. In his position of Vice President of Engineering, he oversaw the engineering, quality assurance and technical support divisions for Monolith.

He left in 2002 with co-workers and co-founders Garrett Price and Bryan Bouwman to form HipSoft and create family friendly games for the casual games market, most notably the Build-a-lot series. He left to found HipSoft after finding he no longer enjoyed working at Monolith since the company had expanded and so he quit to make small causal games with a small team that focused on fun instead of graphics technology. Prior to working at Monolith he developed children's educational software as Senior Software Engineer for Edmark Corporation.

He was making games for profit even while working on a Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of Washington. While in college, he worked as a Research Engineer at the school's department of technical communications and built up his programming skill. He started programming at age 12 after his first initial contact with computers, with his first real game made on a loaned Timex Sinclair in a month long spree. The first game he was offered money for was Text Adventure Maker and even though this was canceled it started Goble's professional game programming career.

He was also a pioneer in Windows 3x graphics for having made the Windows Animation Package engine, one of the first 2D gaming engines with flicker-free software sprites created specifically for Windows. WAP was used in his independent shareware game The Adventures of MicroMan which to this day is spread across retro gaming sites. An updated version of the engine (WAP32 using DirectX) was later used for the likes of Claw, Get Medieval and Gruntz. A special version of MicroMan was made for the "Monolith CD" and a more recent one was made for HipSoft. Another early creation of his is Galactic Battle, a sort of enriched variant on the classic Space Invaders.

He was interviewed by Tom "Mugwum" Bramwell in Bloody Interviews: History and his outside interests includes automobile modification, Disneyland, weather, and other computing topics.

[edit] Video games

• Other HipSoft games (2002-present).
• Build-a-lot series (2007-2009), HipSoft.
• Tron 2.0 (2003), Buena Vista Interactive.
• No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way (2002), Fox Interactive, Inc., Sierra Entertainment, Inc.
• No One Lives Forever - Game of the Year Edition (2001), Fox Interactive, Inc.
• Tex Atomic's Big Bot Battles (2001), Real Networks, Inc.
• The Operative: No One Lives Forever (2000), Fox Interactive, Inc.
• Gruntz (1999), Monolith Productions, Inc.
• Blood II: The Chosen (1998), GT Interactive Software Corp.
• Get Medieval (1998), Monolith Productions, Inc.
• Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (1998), MC2-Microïds, Monolith Productions, Inc.
• Claw (1997), Monolith Productions, Inc.
• "Monolith CD", Monolith Productions, Inc.
• Millie's Math House (1995), Edmark Corporation.
• Thinkin' Things Collection 2 (1995), Edmark Corporation.
• The Adventures of MicroMan (1993), independent shareware.
• NY Warriors (1991), Arcadia Systems, Inc.
• Big Blue Disk #39 (1990), Softdisk Publishing.
• Galactic Battle (1990), Softdisk Publishing.
• Roboman (1989), XOR Corporation.
• Pharaoh's Revenge (1988), Softdisk Publishing.
• Text Adventure Maker (1982), Antic magazine (canceled).

[edit] External links

• Old personal website from the late 1990s to early 2000s
• Page on Goble's auto-modifications
• HipSoft profile
• Brian Goble on MobyGames
• Interview over HipSoft
• Blog post on MicroMan
• Notable MicroMan fan site
• Page on a speaking engagement at the 2009 Game Developers Conference

[edit] See Also

• Nick Newhard (designer of Blood, has worked for Edmark Corporataion, HipSoft partner Big Fish Games, and causal game company PopCap Games)
• Daniel Bernstein (Monolith musician, founder of the casual gaming company Sandlot Games)