Richard Gray

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Richard Gray

Richard " Levelord " Gray (born November 15, 1957 in New Haven , Connecticut , USA ) is one of the most renowned and experienced level designers in the computer game industry. He designed levels for some of the first first-person shooters and shaped the entire genre with his work. With his nickname Levelord he became known through hidden clues in his levels that could only be reached by cheating : You're not supposed to be here - Levelord .

biography

After growing up in New Haven, he moved to New Canaan , Connecticut at the age of ten , where he attended high school and then Pennsylvania State University . In 1976 he joined the American Navy and served a year on the USS Detroit and then three years as Ocean Systems Technician in Adak , Alaska , and Norfolk , Virginia , where he looked for nuclear and diesel-powered Soviet submarines listened. After he finished his military service in 1980, he moved to Los Angeles .

He graduated in business-oriented programming in 1981 and worked for three years at the Kirkhill Rubber Company in Brea , California . He attended night school in Kirkhill for a year, then dropped out and attended community college in Santa Monica , California for two years . He was accepted as a student at UCLA and graduated in Computer Engineering in 1990. Then he moved back to the east coast. In Manhattan , he studied computer graphics for a year at NYU and then worked for three years at Bauer Aerospace as a software engineering supervisor. He was then accepted by the University of Connecticut for its Master of Business program.

Gray was an avid computer game player and played almost more games than his career could finance. When the Doom Editing Utilities (DEU), a collection of programs for creating your own levels for the first person shooter Doom , appeared, he quickly found great fun in designing and developing new levels. In February 1994 he published his first work on Compuserve : GrayDOOM, an amateur level pack with four levels for Doom . His levels caught the attention of Nick Newhard and back in September of that year he was hired by Q Studios to create levels for the game Blood .

In March 1995 he got a full-time job at Apogee Software (later known as 3D Realms ) and designed half of the levels for Duke Nukem 3D . After a year and a half, he left the company in August 1996 to work for a small company called Hipnotic in Dallas , Texas . Hipnotic later became Ritual Entertainment . There he worked on the Scourge of Armagon - add-on for Quake , which was published in 1997 and was the first game to contain a deathmatch level of platforms floating freely in space (called HIPDM1), thus inventing the type of so-called space floater , which in later games like Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament 2004 spread. Scourge of Armagon was voted Best Action Game and Game of the Year by Readers of Computer Gaming World magazine - although it was just an add-on.

His next game was SiN (1998), which featured the first professionally designed map where players were only about the size of rats (a deathmatch level called Spry ).

In addition to his work at Ritual Entertainment, he worked for several other game companies and helped them develop various games, including American McGee's Alice from Rogue Entertainment and James Bond: Agent under Fire from Electronic Arts .

He has also been teaching at the Guildhall of Southern Methodist University since the summer of 2003 . There he teaches students the basics of level design and programming.

Gray is a member of the Dallas Chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an association of game developers from the Dallas area .

Games

literature

  • GameStar Issues 6/99 & 7/99: The Secrets of the Level Lord

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gray, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Levelord
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American level designer
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH New Haven , USA