Patrick Buckland

Patrick Buckland
Nationality	British
Known for	Video games

Patrick Buckland is a British computer programmer and chief executive officer of Stainless Games, which he co-founded with Neil Barnden in 1994. He was born in London and moved to the Isle of Wight at the age of 2. Buckland still lives on the Isle of Wight with his wife and two children (Jules Buckland and Sean Buckland) and is a direct descendant of renowned geologist/palaeontologist William Buckland and his son, renowned zoologist Frank Buckland.

His first experiences with computers occurred in 1978 while at school on the Isle of Wight, at the age of 15. In 1979 he began working at modifying the Lemonade and Breakout games that came with the system and, two years later, had finished his first full game, Liberator, for “the wonderfully titled Thorn EMI Video Programmes Ltd on his Apple II.

From there, he became a freelance programmer, taking on "whatever work was available on the Apple II and the Mac." This resulted in working on a shooter game called Crystal Raider which he notes came from "the observation of people messing around in applications such as MacPaint".

Soon after the game's release, Buckland decided to work on a follow up, Crystal Quest, which would take the gameplay of its predecessor, and add new features. The game ended up ported to numerous other platforms, including the Apple IIgs, Amiga, Nintendo Game Boy and Palm.

In 1993, Along with Neil Barnden, Buckland started up Stainless Software “in order to concentrate on games”. Among their first clients was Argonaut Games, who contracted the team to work on 3D engine development. Two years later, in 1995, the company landed their first games contract, with British publisher SCi, after pitching a title called 3D Destruction Derby in 1994.

...
Wikipedia