Karl Roelofs
| Karl Roelofs | |
|---|---|
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| Born | September 11, 1964 |
| Residence | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Occupation | Creative Director and Producer at Zojoi, LLC |
| Years active | 1985–present |
| Employer | |
| Notable work | |
| Style | |
| Home town | Arlington Heights, Illinois |
| Website | zojoi |
| Notes | |
Karl Roelofs (born September 11, 1964) is an American video game developer known for creating the MacVenture game Shadowgate. He is a co-founder of the video game development company Zojoi, LLC with Dave Marsh.
Karl Roelofs began his career in video game development in 1985 when his best friend Dave Marsh enlisted him to help with designing a video game for ICOM Simulations. Karl had wanted to be a writer and saw an opportunity in Dave's offer. He accepted the chance to design and write a fantasy adventure game and began working with Dave to create their first game together which would later be called Shadowgate. Karl was hired at ICOM Simulations in 1987 after the company had already released its first two MacVenture games, Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True, Uninvited, and while working on and finishing Shadowgate.
Karl and Dave were not fully aware of how successful the games they developed were at the time as they were mostly focused on porting the MacVenture games to as many computer systems as possible. Together with Dave, Karl worked on a sequel to Shadowgate called Beyond Shadowgate which was to be the next Shadowgate MacVenture title. The game was four times larger than the original Shadowgate and had been fully designed and scripted, but ICOM Simulations got a contract with NEC to develop for the TurboGrafx-16. ICOM decided to shift their focus from adventure games to side scrolling and top-down action games. This prompted a redesign of Beyond Shadowgate for the TurboGrafx-CD as a hybrid side-scrolling and adventure game.
In 1993, ICOM Simulations was purchased by Viacom, Inc. and renamed to "Viacom New Media". Karl began to work on games based on MTV and Nickelodeon properties, such as Nickelodeon GUTS and Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day. After Viacom shut down Viacom New Media in 1998, Karl Roelofs went on to work for brief stints at Konami of America and Kesmai Studios/Electronic Arts. A highlight of this period was his involvement in an online version of the Settlers of Catan for MSN Zone.
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