Dan Gorlin

Dan Gorlin is a video game programmer and designer best known for his 1982 Apple II game Choplifter. He also teaches and performs West African dance-drumming with Alokli West African Dance, an organization which Gorlin has directed since 1985.

Gorlin accidentally got into game development. While living in Los Angeles working for the Rand Corporation researching artificial intelligence, he borrowed an Apple II from his grandfather. While trying to sell his house and sitting at home for six months, out of sheer boredom, he started writing a game that drew on his affinity for helicopters. A local kid doing odd jobs for Gorlin suggested he should add men to pick up, like in Defender. What resulted from his changes became his seminal game Choplifter. Gorlin completed the game in six months.

Gorlin's next game, Airheart, also for the Apple II, took three years to complete. The following game, Typhoon Thompson, took about two years, but Gorlin admits that the development of these games overlapped somewhat. The development for these games took so long because Gorlin started other games in between—a black hole game and a seaplane game—which proved too ambitious and which he ended up abandoning. During this time, however, he built a lot of tools whose descendants he still uses today.

During this time, Gorlin was an independent developer with an informal relationship with Brøderbund, who published his first game. Being his own boss, Gorlin never felt pressure to finish anything, so a lot of concepts he abandoned, though he thought they would make good games. He just got bored with developing them and said that if he had the modern equivalent of a game producer pressuring him, he might have actually finished them. He concedes that with a corporate structure, he probably never would have had the freedom to develop his fledgling "experiments" in the first place.

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