Bill Slease

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

The Development Team
Bill Slease
Gender:	Male
Job:	Senior Programmer
Forum Name:	Umbrellaman

Bill Slease - Senior Programmer • - by Bill S - Mar 28, 2006 - •

"I remember sitting in my Dad's friend's kitchen. I was ten. There was a goofy contraption he'd brought home from work that looked a little like a typewriter. If you wanted to build a typewriter that could defeat the Germans, it would probably look a lot like this thing. In addition to the keyboard (I use the term loosely) there was a goofy rubber receptacle into which my Dad's friend plugged the kitchen phone receiver. This thing, I would later learn, was called a teletype. And the number he dialed was a mainframe…somewhere.

"There was a Frankensteinian moment where the kitchen lights flared, and the teletype hummed, and I watched it come alive. This is what it said to me:

"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

> ?

" "Type 'down,'" my Dad's friend said. So I did.

"Vvvvvvvvt, the paper roll rolled. The teletype typed. And now it told me:

"In A Valley

"You are in a valley in a forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed.

> ?

"I was hooked. I don't know what everyone else did that night, but I was glued to this story-telling robot from the future. I went home and bought a Commodore Vic-20 and learned to do amazing things with BASIC like:

"10 Print "Hello"

"20 Goto 10

"I wrote my first game on the Vic-20. It was a top-down Spy Hunter clone called Swifty that took half an hour to load from the tape drive. It had a midi theme song that I can sing for you sometime. One Saturday morning the drive ate the tape and that, I'm afraid, was the end of that. I graduated to the Commodore 64 and wrote assembly code that cycled the screen color so fast the monitor couldn't keep up. That, my friends, was power.

"Twenty-five years passed. After a brief stint as a Navy officer, a longer stint as a youth minister, an equally long stint as a programmer at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, and a very long stint at Cyan Worlds working on titles like Uru and Myst 5, my wife, my daughter and I find ourselves in Phoenix, Arizona of all places working on a very cool Stargate project.

"I can't help feeling as if…I'm standing at the end of a road before a small brick building…

"Vvvvvvvvt."

~ Bill Slease

Post from Meet Your Development Team:

"Hi there.

I'm Bill Slease, and I'm currently working on prototyping our combat system. I came to Cheyenne in December of 2005, attracted by the unusual mix of creativity, maturity and professionalism of everyone I met. We've more than doubled in size since then, and the trend has continued. I can't wait to play this game we're making.

I breed Himalayan Snow Leopards at my ranch in Utah, participate in amateur rocket car circuits, and am thoroughly enjoying my 4-day old Tivo.

The part about the Tivo is true, I swear.

Bill"