Gordon Walton

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Gordon Walton at Kesmai in 1998

(Conrad) Gordon Walton, Jr. (b. 1956) is an American video game developer and executive producer who has worked in nearly every major online game company in the United States, from Maxis to Electronic Arts to Sony Online to Bioware. Since 1977 he has personally developed over thirty games, and overseen development of hundreds more, working as a producer, vice-president or executive producer.

Biography

Walton was born on March 2, 1956 in Houston, Texas, to Conrad G. Walton, Sr., an architect, and Rilda Akin, an artist. He attended Spring Woods High School in Houston, and then enlisted in the U.S. Army from 1974-1977, attaining the rank of Sergeant. He was stationed at Fort Ord, Fort Gordon, Fort Hood, Fort Chaffee, and Kaiserslautern, Germany. In 1977 he left the army to enroll at Texas A&M University, and continued serving in the U.S. National Guard until 1979. In 1981, he received his BS degree in computer science. From 1991-1992 he also served briefly in the US Army Reserve.

Game developer

He played his first computer game in 1977 on PLATO, and published his first computer game, Trek-X, in 1978 on the Commodore PET 2001. In 1984, he co-founded Applied Computing (later called Digital Illusions) with Don Gilman, and he was development manager for both Three-Sixty Pacific and Konami of America, Inc.

Though his work had been exclusively in the single-player game industry up until that point, in 1995 he joined the growing online game industry, managing games such as Air Warrior and Multiplayer Battletech at Kesmai. After Kesmai, Walton moved on to managing Ultima Online at Origin Systems, and then at Sony Online Entertainment in Austin he worked on Star Wars Galaxies. At Maxis, he was executive producer on The Sims Online. He is currently working on an unknown as yet MMOG for a new studio set up by Bioware in Austin.

He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as E-3, GDC, and the Austin Games Conference, and attained fame in 2003 for a talk entitled, "Ten Great Reasons You Don't want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game." He is also active in the AIAS and IGDA, and currently sits on the steering committee of the IGDA's Online Games SIG.

Walton currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Laura Ann Miskines Walton, and children John and Katherine.

Selected projects

The following is a brief list of games which Walton either managed, produced, or developed:

References

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