Name: Warren Robinett
Birth: 1951
Death: Date
Occupation/Title: interactive computer graphics software designer

Bio Summary: Warren Robinett helped lay the foundation for classic action adventure games.

Early Life/Family:

Education/Training: Bachelors in Computer Applications to Language and Art, Rice University. Masters of Science from UC Berkeley.

Career Outline: Worked on the Nano Manipulator. He was 26 when he started working for Atari in 1977. Quit Atari in 1979 because management didn't give credit to its designers. Helped found educational software publisher The Learning Company in 1980. Designed the Virtual Environment Workstation at Nasa. Ran a virtual reality program at the University of Northern Carolina.

Impact on Gaming: While working for Atari he developed the game Adventure. Adventure is considered the first action adventure video game. Atari was not giving credit to the designers for the games they produced. Robinett decided to give himself credit by creating a secret room that said , " Created by Warren Robinett. " This was the first instance of "Easter Eggs" in games. At the time most games took place within one screen. Robinett made it possible for the game to span across mulitple screens therefore enlarging the game world. Adventure introduced monsters that showed "intelligence". The monsters react to objects with a different degree of priority which makes it seem like they "change their minds". Sold the Learning Company to Mattel in 1998 for around 3.8 billion. Mattel nearly went bankrupt due to bad due deligence and laid off 10% of their employeess. As a result Mattel was barred from entering the video game industry again. Did extensive research with virtual reality.Created the Nanomanipulator which allows users to interact with individual molecules; it has been used with viruses.

Influences: Mainframe text game Colossal Cave Adventure influenced his game Adventure which was created by Don Woods and Willie Crowther. Comic books and science fiction. Later Beatles albums that had the " I buried Paul" lyrics if you played the album backwards.

Personality: Stubborn, his boss told him to drop Adventure due to limitations on the 2600 but he continued. Mischievous. Good sense of humor. Know-it-all. Devious.

Miscellaneous: $22000 salary at Atari. Member of the Dumb Shits Club. Members are required to design games for Atari and not make money from it. The programmers that went to form Imagic and Activision are multi millionaires. His signature took up 5% of the total memory in Adventure.

Gameography:
Slot Racers: racing game that was considered a learning exercise.
Adventure which eventually sold 1 million copies.
BASIC programming cartridge.
Rocky's Boots.

Related Links:www.warrenrobinett.com/nano/

Bibliographic References:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13280
www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_Warren_Robinett.html

Contributors To This Listing: Allan Huang