Paul Steed

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Paul Howard Steed, Jr is a video game modeller and artist. He has worked for Origin Systems, Electronic Arts, id Software, Wild Tangent, Microsoft's Xbox, Atari, and now Exigent. He created artwork or models for several prominent game series including Wing Commander and Quake. He was employed by id Software until he was fired in retaliation for conflict over the creation of Doom 3 (according to John Carmack).^[1]

Steed began his career with videogames in 1991 at Origin Software, after answering a newspaper ad that said "Fantasy artist wanted". Starting as a game design sketcher, he moved up to art director then project director. Steed has indicated he "didn't touch a mouse until I was 27." He worked as an art director at Virgin Entertainment and a designer at Iguana entertainment as well. In 2000 after being fired from id Software he went to work for Wild Tangent making several dancing girl visualizers for Winamp and a third-person shooter called Betty Bad (an homage to Steed's favorite arcade game, Tempest).

Steed gained press and controversy with the release of a "Crackwhore" female model for Quake II in response to a skin (character texture) contest for the first Quake sponsored by a group of female gamers who called themselves the "Crackwhore Clan". The Crackwhore model was released after Quake II was released as a downloadable character as an homage to that same female gamer clan. While Quake II included a female character as an option when playing, both the phraseology and approach to the Crackwhore model received some amount of criticism.

Steed is active in the game development community and gives talks not only at the annual Game Developer's Conference, but also at universities and art institutes. He also has initiated and sponsored several modeling contests such as the Bad Girl and Cute Doll contests by which he challenged any and all other modelers to compete against him for sponsored prizes.

Steed is a published author who has written on modelling and animating characters for 3D games. He is currently the creative director for Atari's product development group and is based in Manhattan, NY.

[edit] Bibliography

Steed, Paul (2001). Modelling a Character in 3DS Max. Wordware Publishing. ISBN 1-55622-815-5.
Steed, Paul (2002). Animating Real-Time Game Characters. Charles River Media. ISBN 1-58450-270-3.
Steed, Paul (2005). Modelling a Character in 3DS Max, 2nd Edition. Wordware Publishing. ISBN 1-55622-088-X