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Mac Gaming Gods: Brian Greenstone
August 31, 2001 | Lucian Fong | | Pages: |  | 1 | 2 |  |
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Nanosaur, Bugdom, Cro-Mag Rally, Otto Matic. Perhaps you have heard of those games? You can bet that the legions of iMac and iBook users out there have become familiar with Pangea Software and their quality games by now. As the CEO, lead programmer, tech support guy and janitor, Brian Greenstone and his small team of artists and musicians have made a name for themselves developing original, Mac-only games. In the Mac gaming industry, original development has gradually been swept aside in favor of ports of popular PC games. Brian’s innovation and focus on unadulterated gameplay has proven to be very successful despite this trend.Brian’s journey into the world of Mac gaming began in 1981 when he was visiting a cousin who had a TRS-80 (Tandy Radio Shack). "We spent an hour or so typing in a bunch of POKE commands to build a blocky stick figure guy on the screen. I though that was pretty cool at the time!" he said of his first programming experience. Brian’s first "official" job was for a greeting card and medical supply company that was run out of a garage in Houston. He wrote an accounting program on an Apple II+. When he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, Brian hooked up with Visual Concepts programming Super Nintendo games. If you’ve ever played Harley’s Humongous Adventure, Claymates, or Lester the Unlikely, then you’ve witnessed Brian’s handywork. Later, he went to work for Mindscape, where he did more SNES games and a Playstation came called Steel Harbinger. In 1992, Brian began to learn C on his Mac IIx and realized how easy it was to program on the Mac. He was further encouraged by the detailed documentation. Prior to that, he had been programming in assembly on the Apple II, IIgs and Nintendo 16. A seemingly cruel twist of fate led to the founding of Pangea. It was the winter of 1987, and Brian had just broken up with his girlfriend. He had nothing to do during Christmas break so he began writing a game called Xenocide on his Apple IIgs. Needing a name to put behind his new project, Brian came up with ‘Pangea’. He wrote and self-published many other games on the IIgs, such as Cosmocade, Grackle, Orbizone, Quadronome, Copy Killers, and Senseless Violence I: The Survival of the Fetus (Brian swears that is the actual name of the game). On the Mac, Pangea was responsible for Bloodsuckers, Fireball, Power Pete, Weekend Warrior, Nanosaur, Bugdom, Cro-Mag Rally, and Otto Matic, which is currently in development. As the head honcho of Pangea Software, Brian’s daily routine involves answering tech support e-mails in the morning, coding and running errands during the day, and then answering more support e-mails at the end of the day. When he isn’t programming on his Radeon-equipped G4/400 or Titanium PowerBook G4/500, Brian is enjoying the mayhem in Carmageddon, his favorite "racing game" on the Mac.. He is also a big fan of Rayman 2 on the Dreamcast or Playstation 2. He pegs it as "probably the best 3D game ever in terms of artistic quality and gameplay." Next, we present you with a short interview with Brian Greenstone.
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