Electronic Arts
San Mateo, California
1993 to March 1994
Game Artist / Developer

• PowerPOKER (now iPoker) for Mac — Macworld’s “Sports Game of the Year” for 1995

On personal time I designed, developed and shipped The Ultimate Poker Simulation for the Mac. My first choice in publishers picked it up immediately. I worked closely with EA on technical design reviews, contract negotiation, scheduling, final development, testing, bug tracking, and porting. I even wrote the manual for them. PowerPOKER shipped to rave reviews. It was the first Mac game to use QuickTime and synthesized speech. It allowed up to 10 players to compete over an AppleTalk network. It sported a very easy-to-use GUI with highly detailed animation effects and unprecedented flexibility for a card simulation. It shipped with over 80 poker game scripts, but its general scripting architecture allowed users to write their own poker rules and the engine actually learned how to play the game competitively. When the iMac came out in 1998, I rewrote the game in C++ as iPoker, bumped its games up to 101, and released it on the Web as shareware.

The Backstory

Coming soon…