Tim Skelly (Star Castle, Sonic 2) at CGE!
This week I will be announcing at least one new LEGEND who will appear at Classic Gaming Expo on August 9th and 10th, ending in a summarized update at the Classic Gaming Expo site.
You can view details on all of the confirmed legends who will be speaking, meeting, greeting, and signing autographs at this year's Classic Gaming Expo , but in this forum I'm going to provide some details about them. Take note of games and items that you might want to bring along for signatures!
Tim Skelly
Mr. Tim Skelly is legendary for the quality -- and quantity of his vector arcade game creations while at Cinematronics. Vectorscan graphics was a popular method used in displaying objects on the screen in videogames in the 1970's and early 1980's, and Skelly's early successes in this area led to several other companies following suit with vector graphics coin-op games of their own.
Between May, 1978 and May, 1981 Tim Skelly designed and programmed the classic vector graphic arcade games Star Hawk, Sundance, Warrior, Rip-Off and Armor Attack. During that time he also designed the fondly remembered (and still popular) Star Castle (programmed by Scott Boden) and the best forgotten War of the Worlds. Possibly the first artist/programmer to work in the field, all of these games, as well as all of his future projects, featured Mr. Skelly's own art.
From Cinematronics, Tim made a brief stop at Gremlin/Sega before going freelance. His first contract was to create pinball giant D. Gottlieb and Co.'s first original video game, Reactor. Two more games followed, both vanishing with the rest of the industry in the video game crash of 1983.
In 1986 Mr. Skelly climbed back on the horse. The Amiga computer had just been launched and as an artist, Tim finally saw an opportunity to develop quality bitmap graphics. He joined Richard and Elaine Ditton and Reactor sound designer David Thiel to develop Epyx's Winter Games for the Amiga, and shortly thereafter, Championship Wrestling. This core team grew to become Incredible Technologies. As IT's Art Director for six years, Mr. Skelly supervised a team of artists and personally created the artwork for Cinemaware's The Three Stooges Game, and FASA's original BattleTech Center. For the latter he was also called upon to design the "battlemechs" that form the core of today's MechWarrior universe. His last project for IT was to design and program a four-player version of his Cinematronics classic, Rip-Off.
In 1992, Tim Skelly was recruited by Sega to be Art Director for their special game development division, Sega Technical Institute. There he oversaw the work of both Japanese and American artists. The principle project completed there during his stay was Sonic the Hedgehog 2, for which he designed and created the "special round" graphics.
When Sonic 2 was finished, Mr. Skelly went to work as a Researcher in "software giant" Microsoft's Research Group. At Microsoft he consulted on Microsoft Bob (don't blame him if they didn't listen) and was part of the team that created the first fully interactive, 3D, real time, speech and speech recognition capable autonomous software agent, Peedy the Parrot. He also received a patent for his contributions to Microsoft's cartoon chat application, Comic Chat. Still, during his four year stay at Microsoft Mr. Skelly believes his principle contribution was to harangue Microsoft's developers about how crappy their interfaces were. While he does not claim credit, Tim is pleased to note that Microsoft's interfaces are slightly less crappy now than they were when he began work there.
Originally interested in pursuing a career in film and video production, Mr. Skelly today spends his time creating short films, the last of which was accepted for ACM SIGGRAPH's prestigious annual film theater presentation.
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