Blizzard Arcade

In the early days of Blizzard when it was called Silicon & Synapse we made a number of console games for SNES, Sega, Amiga and PC. I was primarily and artist and animator for those games but also the lead designer. These were games like The Lost Vikings 1 & 2, RPM Racing, Rock n Roll Racing, Blackthorne. I learned a lot back in the day from the good folks at Interplay who would come over and sit in with us to help us learn our craft. The Lost Vikings was also the first game I helped creat and lead the design on. I got myself into deep complex logic puzzle troube with each level design because each of the three characters you had to get to the exit together all had different skills. So logic holes would happen and I'd have to solve them. I ended up getting away from graph paper design to use Deluxe Paint and some coded up tools to make level layouts faster. Rock n Roll Racing would go on to use 3D modelling which we drew over with pixels using Deluxe Paint Animator. The creation of the isometric track view with various angled ramps to be all packed into a 1024 cells of 8x8 pixels was one of the greatest technical art challenges of it's time. I'm proud to have solved challenges like these and to have learned so much from my peers and mentors at the time.