Philip Price
Philip Price is best known for computer game designs and creative programming done using the Atari 8-bit family of home computers, and was one of the founders of Paradise Programming. Along with Gary Gilbertson, he created Alternate Reality.
He started programming in the 1970s using an IBM System/370 mainframe to create multiplayer computer games and to learn programming.
At age 16, he went to Virginia Tech. The university acquired a new mainframe system from Honeywell that used Multics. At Virginia Tech, he created a multiplayer nuclear wargame and the game's popularity among students led Virginia Tech to ban games on campus mainframes. This ban was still in effect twenty years later for campus mainframes.(a graduate of Virginia Tech from the late 1990s attested to this fact).
Price joined the US Navy, and operated a United States Naval reactor. By 1983, he was out of the Navy, living in a shack with no running water and writing computer games using an Atari 400 with a membrane keyboard and cassette drive using a Jeep for power. His first commercial game The Tail of Beta Lyrae was a side scroller loosely based on Scramble (arcade game). It used real-time continuous terrain generation, a novel musical language (AMP, for Advanced Music Processor). This game actually evolved once the player had played it for a few weeks by automatically remembering the number of times the game was played on the original floppy disk and then changing and adding new game elements.
The musical language allowed the composer to define variance in the composition, so that a repetition of a verse might vary as a whole or just in one of the voices with each replay. It included the ability for the music to drive events in the game, as well as the game to drive events in the music. The sounds generated with the AMP music processor software was unique at that time for Atari computer hardware.
Price created the first 3D textured map RPG which was named Alternate Reality, inventing algorithms needed. He implemented software protection in the game that included: block chain ciphers, weak-bit anti-copy technology (invention of the publisher Datasoft), real-time code creation using data folding to prevent static analysis, and memory bank detection which, if it detected a pirate code insertion, would use a self-relocating viral code to perform a memory wipe.
He left the game industry and worked for Computer Sciences Corporation for ten years as a Computer Scientist on the mission control rooms systems used to test the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. He advocated, designed, and helped implement the system with more distributed processing, a new object oriented design, and written in a new language called C++. He was also a voting member of the ANSI C++ standards committee (X3J16) for a number of years.
After leaving CSC he worked for a few companies, including Creative Labs and Monolith Productions. Jason Hall, who was CEO of Monolith Productions at the time, had planned on remaking Alternate Reality (computer game) as a MMORPG in 1997. Funding did not come through and Monolith looked to other publishers for funding for development. Publishers who looked at it at the time felt it had too many innovations. These innovative concepts included: grid computing based architecture with tiers, procedurally generated trees, emotive player interaction, 5.1 sound (downmix to stereo), a living world that persisted and changed, and suggested release on newer DVD-ROM media (as well as CD). The risk seen by publishers at that time for a new market was too high to spend the millions of dollars that development would have cost. Later, games such as World of Warcraft have come to dominate the billion dollar MMORPG field that became extremely popular years later.
Later he worked on telephony systems (Nortel), the stock market (Instinet) (where he created new algorithms and data formats for a company to reduce their network bandwidth usage by 45%) and Trilogy.
In 2006, Price worked for Raytheon as a Principal Software Engineer. That work included Systems and Software work on future combat systems, next generation navy ships, strategic command and staff training simulators and other systems. Some of those tasks included spending time in Iraq in 2005.