Hal Bio

WORK HISTORY:

• FREELANCE

Nowadays I'm an independent contractor working for my own company, Finite Arts, which "loans out" my design and writing services to clients.

• LUCASARTS

I joined the company as a project leader in 1990 and while I was there designed wrote, and supervised a number of game projects, leaving in autumn 2003.

• HOLLYWOOD

Before building games professionally, I pursued a career in Hollywood, writing dozens of screenplays over a twenty year span, mostly with my partner, Matthew Robbins. It's a measure of the difficulty of the screen trade that only six movies emerged from this effort with my name on them, plus a few others where my writing is uncredited. Commerce is a crude discriminator, and, as usual with screenwriters, a lot of my best work wound up in a trunk.

BACKGROUND:

• EDUCATION

Among writers and game developers qualifications rarely matter -- it's what you know how to do that counts. Nevertheless, I went to school where I somehow developed a lifelong curiosity about art, science, cabbages, and kings...

     > Brown University; B.A., Honors in Art
     > Rhode Island School of Design; Freshman Foundation, other classes
     > University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television; MFA

• PERSONAL HISTORY

I was born and raised in Hanover, New Hampshire. My passion for game design goes back to childhood and hard lessons in Monopoly, chess, and paper-rock- scissors taught by merciless older siblings (four of them). I didn't see a future in what we now call "paper games," however. My father ran the local movie theater, and early exposure to films like Citizen Kane, Red River and The Thing from Another World stirred my interest in cinema, which was an appealing form of entertainment back in the sixties, because, if nothing else, it already existed!

One summer, back home from film school on vacation, I learned BASIC at Dartmouth College (where it was invented). The idea that people who weren't scientists or engineers could learn to operate computers struck me like a thunderbolt. After a while, digits became more attractive than sprockets, and now I'm a game guy.

INTERESTS:

• PROFESSIONAL

I'm an accomplished developer, plying my trade for many years in many roles.
Here's what I like to do best...

     > Game Design
     > Dramatic Writing
     > Cinematic Planning

• PERSONAL

The actress Lillian Gish once thanked movie director D.W. Griffith for teaching her that work is more fun than play. And so it is in the game business. Still, life is larger than work, so here are some of my other enthusiasms...

     > Family gatherings
     > Running, biking, hiking, skiing
     > Playing games — of course!
     > Web design
     > Movies, reading, television, theater, toys
     > Teaching