Chris Todd

My first job out of college was working as one of the main programmers on Wing Commander III, a title widely credited with being the first "interactive movie" due to its extensive use of non-linear, live-action cut scenes filmed by a professional crew in Hollywood. My job was to design a system that could integrate hours of movie footage with a 3D spaceflight engine and the user's input to create the illusion of a coherent story. The result was Scheherazade, a completely flexible multimedia scripting system. It was a hell of an introduction to the gaming industry, but an achievment of which I'm still proud. Wing Commander III was translated into several languages, ported to a number of other platforms, and went on to become one of the best-selling computer games of all time.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World Premier Action Game of the Year (1995)
• PC Gamer Readers Choice Award (1995)
• Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame