Warren Spector

Warren Spector is a famous game designer whose work includes Deus Ex, Thief, and Ultima I & II.

Early Life

Warren Evan Spector was born in 1955 and earned a Masters of Art degree in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas and a Bachelors Degree in Communications from Northwestern University.

Career

Spector began working for Steve Jackson Games creating tradition role-playing games. While there, Spector, alongside Greg Costikyan, an old friend from high school, developed the game Toon. His next job was working for the R&D Department of TSR Inc, the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons games, where he worked on games such as Spelljammer and Top Secret/S.I.. He worked at Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios on classic games like Ultima Underworld I and II, Thief: The Dark Project, and System Shock. He left those companies to found Ion Storm with John Romero, Tom Hall, Jerry O'Flaherty, and Todd Porter. Ion Storm was founded on November 15, 1996. While with Ion Storm, Spector developed the Deus Ex games, and the third game in the Thief series, Thief: Deadly Shadows. Spector left Ion Storm in 2004, before the studio was closed by Eidos in 2005, stating that he wanted to pursue other interests outside the company. He went on to create a new studio called Junction Point Studios, where he worked on a title being built on Valve's Source engine. Junction Point was bought by Disney Interactive on July 13, 2007.

Teaching

In addition to making games Warren Spector teaches a class on game development at the University of Texas. In a series of lectures and interviews he talked with various former colleagues and others about their careers in game development discussing such subjects as the history of Looking Glass, Origin and Deus Ex. The list of interviewees includes Harvey Smith, Marc LeBlanc, Mike Morhaime and Richard Garriott among others. Videos were briefly published online but were taken down due to a combination of bandwith issues and something about rights not fully acquired, but as one might expect they were quickly collected and saved and are still available here among other places.

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Name	Platforms	Developer
Disney Epic Mickey	WII	Junction Point Studios
Dark Messiah of Might & Magic released on Oct. 25, 2006	PC	Arkane Studios SA, Floodgate Entertainment, LLC, Kuju Entertainment Ltd.
Project: Snowblind released on Feb. 22, 2005	PS2, PC, XBOX	Crystal Dynamics, Inc.
Deus Ex: Invisible War released on Dec. 2, 2003	PC, XBOX	Ion Storm Inc.
Whiplash released on Nov. 18, 2003	XBOX, PS2	Crystal Dynamics, Inc.
Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home released on Oct. 9, 2003	PS2, XBOX	Paradox Development
Thief: Deadly Shadows released on May 27, 2003	PC, XBOX	Ion Storm Inc.
Frequency released on Nov. 19, 2001	PS2	Harmonix Music Systems, Inc.
Cel Damage released on Nov. 14, 2001	GC, XBOX	Pseudo Interactive
Deus Ex released on June 22, 2000	PC, MAC, PS2	Westlake Interactive, Ion Storm Inc.

Full Name:	Warren Spector
Gender:	Male
Birthday:	Oct. 2, 1955
Death:	n/a
Credited In:	33 games
1st Game Credit:	Wing Commander
Currently Working For:	Disney Interactive, Inc.
Hometown:	Austin, Texas
Country:	USA
Website:	http://www.junctionpoint.com/
Email Address:
Aliases:

	SHODAN
	JC Denton
	Garrett
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	Alex D
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