Chris Roberts (game developer)

Christopher " Chris " Roberts ( born May 27, 1968 in Redwood City, California, USA) is an American game designer, and film producer. He was known primarily for his Space Games Wing Commander series.

Life

Roberts grew up in Manchester and sat there as a young game programmer and designer his first projects, Match Day, Wiz Adore and Stryker 's Run to which all made ​​it to 1987 at the top of the sales lists.

In 1986 he moved Roberts returned to the U.S. and worked from now - first as a freelancer, from 1990 then permanently employed as director of new technologies - for Origin Systems. During this collaboration emerged titles such as Times of Lore, a fantasy role-playing game, Bad Blood (1990 ), a post-apocalyptic role-playing game and Strike Commander (1993 ), in which the player plays a mercenary in 2011. In all these projects the backstory played an important role, according to Origin 's motto "We create worlds". Not least because these projects have been praised by the press in the highest terms.

However, Roberts' most famous project and the foundation of its ongoing success to date is the 1990 released Wing Commander, which was also crucial for the breakthrough of the PC as a medium for video games and the improvement of the sound cards. "Wing Commander" also led the first game of the features that the player with his actions the storyline ( limited) could influence and that important characters could die at any time and not just when the story demanded it. The game also had cutscenes in which the story was told. In the first two parts were still short sequences in the animated style. From part three of these were even turned specially for the Games Movies with such well-known actors such as Mark Hamill. In the Wing Commander main series published until 1997, four titles and five add- ons, as well as six more games and add- ons that played in the Wing Commander universe. On the fifth part of the series Roberts, however, was no longer actively involved.

1996 Roberts left Origin and founded with his brother Erin Roberts his own development studio "Digital Anvil ." With this he began production on a Wing Commander movie and various computer games. The film was released in theaters in 1999 and flopped. 2000, the space action game Star Lancer was released. In 2001, Digital Anvil was then bought by its publisher Microsoft and Roberts left the company before his project was completed Freelancer, for only he still acted as advisor.

Finally, Roberts formed a new development studio called Point of No Return Entertainment. With this he planned films to produce TV series and computer games, however it came about, no projects. In 2002 he founded Ascendant Pictures and was producer of several Hollywood feature films, including The Punisher (2004 ), Lord of War - Merchants of Death (2005) and Lucky Number Slevin (2006).

In 2011, Roberts founded a new game company, Cloud Empire Games, with whom he is working on a new space simulation in the style of Wing Commander series called Star Citizen. For the space game development Roberts could collect over 40 million dollars in donations, of which the majority through crowd funding on its project website, the rest ran about Kickstarter.com. Star Citizen is calculated from cloud empire on a development time of about two years. It will be marketed according to Roberts in the online direct sales without a publisher.

Games

In development:

• Star Citizen

Movies

Awards

In 2009, he was counted among the all time top 100 game developers from the U.S. online games IGN.