Lori Ann Cole is a game designer, often in cooperation with her husband, professional game programmer Corey Cole. Their team was later named Transolar Games. Lori also maintains a photography and Web design studio known as FAR Studio[1].
Cole's varied background includes elementary education, film animation, and writing. She is a fanatic role-playing video game player, who is uninterested in adventure games. Because of her husband's involvement in Sierra On-line, she decided to create a hybrid role-playing/adventure game. The result was Quest for Glory series.
In a 2003 interview,[2] Cole said, "My favorite game is Shadows of Darkness. It had the proper moods of sombre and silly, scary and magical. It brought back Ad Avis to plague the hero, and introduced the tragic villain of Katrina. It even had the tragic sacrifice of the monster Toby that foreshadows the ending. The game had the strongest of the stories, and put the player in the greatest of dangers without friends or allies." For many fans of the series, however, Shadow of Darkness received many criticisms due to large number of bugs in the game, making it nearly unplayable—a fact which she also acknowledged, "If you could make it past the thousands of bugs, it was a great game." (Patches are available for most of the bugs at this point.)
Other works in Sierra include a voicing role in the CD-ROM version of King's Quest V and designing Mixed-Up Fairy Tales.
During those years Lori was a freelance contractor with Sierra working for royalties. When the fifth game of the Quest for Glory series was about to be cancelled, Lori and Corey formed FAR Productions and created Shannara for Legend Entertainment.
Finally, when hired as an employee for Sierra, she joined the development team for Dragon Fire, which was released in 1998.
Lori had a cameo headshot in SWAT 2. She has also worked on a text adventure game[3][4] featuring the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School, from which the hero in the Quest for Glory games graduated.
|
|||||