Bob Bates

Robert Bob Bates is an American computer games designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was cofounder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocoms dissolution in 1989, Bates cofounded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. He has designed, written, or produced scores of games, including Unreal II , SpiderMan, and Eric the Unready , listed as Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World magazine and also included on the 1996 list of 150 best games of all time. In 1998 he wrote the awardwinning game Quandaries for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design and development in works such as the 2001 book Game Design The Art and Business of Creating Game

Bates was born in 1953 in Greenbelt, Maryland, the fourth of eight children to Frances and James Bates. His father was a mathematician, who from 19631967 moved the family to Cheltenham, England. Upon returning to the United States, Bob attended DeMatha High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, graduating in 1971, and then went on to Georgetown University, where he pursued a double major in philosophy and psychology, receiving his A.B. in philosophy in 1975. His first job after college was as tourguide for Washington Group Tours, a job he took since it allowed him free time between tours to pursue his writing efforts. In 1977 he met his future wife, Peggy Oriani, whom he married in January 1978, and then founded his own tour company, Potomac Tours. In 1982, with the approach of his 30th birthday, he sold the company to spend two years writing a novel, though did not finish. It was around this time that Bates father gave his old TRS80 computer to his son, to help with the novelwriting. With

Source: Wikipedia