Kelton Flinn
Encyclopedia
Kelton Flinn is an American
computer game designer who is a major pioneer in online games. He is a co-founder (with his University of Virginia
classmate John Taylor) of the seminal online game company Kesmai
, which they began in 1982. His best known title is the first graphical multi-player online game offered by a major service, Air Warrior
(1987).
, Will Crowther, Don Daglow
and Gregory Yob
, Flinn and Taylor were key innovators in the 1970s university gaming culture, where students played for free on college mainframe
computers. Flinn took advantage of his pursuit of an advanced degree (a PhD
in Applied Mathematics
) to build a long series of games across his undergraduate and graduate school career. Most students lost all access to computers after graduation in the days before personal computers were invented, but Flinn's extended years of study gave him the chance to build a large body of major works.
Key games Flinn and Taylor created during this time include:
Kesmai, and began working with CompuServe
to offer multi-player games on a fee-per-hour basis. But once they began porting their code it turned out that the code that ran for free on the university's computer was hugely inefficient, and they burned $100,000 USD in computer time on CompuServe's system in three days before concluding they needed to rewrite their engine.
Kesmai's major titles include:
In the 1990s Kesmai was acquired by News Corp, which later sold it to Electronic Arts
. The studio was disbanded, but EA continued to use the Kesmai name as a brand.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
computer game designer who is a major pioneer in online games. He is a co-founder (with his University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
classmate John Taylor) of the seminal online game company Kesmai
Kesmai
Kesmai was a pioneering game developer and online game publisher, founded in 1981 by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. The company was best known for the combat flight sim Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, one of the first graphical MMOGs, launched in 1987...
, which they began in 1982. His best known title is the first graphical multi-player online game offered by a major service, Air Warrior
Air Warrior
Air Warrior was an early multiplayer on-line air-combat simulator. A player is able to fly a simulated World War II aircraft, fighting with and against other players, each flying his own simulated aircraft. It was introduced in 1986 by Kelton Flinn and his company Kesmai. At this time the internet...
(1987).
1970s university mainframe games
Like Marc BlankMarc Blank
Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first hit text adventure computer games, Zork....
, Will Crowther, Don Daglow
Don Daglow
Don Daglow is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer and producer. He is best known for designing a series of pioneering simulation games and role-playing games, as well as the first computer baseball game and the first graphical MMORPG, all between 1971 and 1995...
and Gregory Yob
Gregory Yob
Gregory Yob was an American computer game designer.Gregory was born in Eugene, Oregon. An article about his experiment on simulating gravitational fields with droplets of water on a soap bubble was published in Scientific American in December 1964, under The Amateur Scientist.His one published...
, Flinn and Taylor were key innovators in the 1970s university gaming culture, where students played for free on college mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
computers. Flinn took advantage of his pursuit of an advanced degree (a PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in Applied Mathematics
Applied mathematics
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...
) to build a long series of games across his undergraduate and graduate school career. Most students lost all access to computers after graduation in the days before personal computers were invented, but Flinn's extended years of study gave him the chance to build a large body of major works.
Key games Flinn and Taylor created during this time include:
- AirAir (computer game)Air is a text-based aerial warfare mainframe computer game written in by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. Air foreshadowed the first graphical MMOG, Air Warrior, which was released by the company Flinn and Taylor later founded, Kesmai....
(1977–1979) — a text air combat game that foreshadowed Air Warrior. The first version was created in 1977 and worked on through 1979. As Flinn has said: "If Air Warrior was a primate swinging in the trees, AIR was the text-based amoeba crawling on the ocean floor. But it was quasi-real time, multi-player, and attempted to render 3-D on the terminal using ASCII graphics. It was an acquired taste." - S — a multi-player space colonization and combat game (1979). Flinn and Taylor wrote the game over their summer vacations at the University of Virginia. Mega Wars III would be based on S after they founded Kesmai.
- Dungeons of Kesmai (1980) — a text adventure game with very little puzzle solving and an emphasis on exploration and combat. The game's name would also appear later as a text-based online adventure from Kesmai. Flinn and Taylor had seen and played AdventureColossal Cave AdventureColossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
and ZorkZorkZork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language...
, but chose to emphasize action in their title, again written during their summer vacations as college students. - Island of Kesmai (1981) — expands on their gaming system, in this case trying to use all the power of the university's new VAXVAXVAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
computer. They added rich text descriptions to the ASCIIASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
graphic maps and minimal combat feedback text of their prior games. The university reported—to its dismay—that the game did indeed use all the processing power of the new VAX.
Founding of Kesmai
In 1982 Flinn and Taylor founded the game developerVideo game developer
A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.Most developers also...
Kesmai, and began working with CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
to offer multi-player games on a fee-per-hour basis. But once they began porting their code it turned out that the code that ran for free on the university's computer was hugely inefficient, and they burned $100,000 USD in computer time on CompuServe's system in three days before concluding they needed to rewrite their engine.
Kesmai's major titles include:
- Mega Wars III (1983) — Ironically, it was the chance to create Mega Wars III for CompuServe in 1983 that allowed Kesmai to adapt S for the system and make it available for online play. Another irony: Not one of the Mega Wars games are related to each other except by name; the original was based on the old university mainframe game DECWARDecwarDECWAR is a multiplayer computer game first written in 1978 at the University of Texas at Austin for the PDP-10. It was developed from an earlier two-player version, WAR, adding multi-terminal support for between one and eighteen players. WAR and DECWAR are essentially multiplayer versions of the...
. - Island of Kesmai (1985) — The rewrite of Flinn and Taylor's old text action adventure game went live at the end of 1985 after a long internal test cycle. It cost $6 an hour at 300 baud (the slow dial-up modemModemA modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s of the day), $12 for 1200 baud (the fast dial-up modems). - Stellar Warrior (1985) — This rewrite of Mega Wars III introduced substantially simplified game play to expand its potential audience, and debuted on the GEnieGEnieGEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
online service the same day that Islands of Kesmai went live on CompuServe. - Air WarriorAir WarriorAir Warrior was an early multiplayer on-line air-combat simulator. A player is able to fly a simulated World War II aircraft, fighting with and against other players, each flying his own simulated aircraft. It was introduced in 1986 by Kelton Flinn and his company Kesmai. At this time the internet...
(1986) — This game, offered on GEnieGEnieGEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
, is a key milestone in the history of computer games because it was the first commercial multiplayer online game to add graphics, displaying a 3D airplane dogfight environment. (The original Neverwinter NightsNeverwinter NightsNeverwinter Nights , produced by BioWare and published by Infogrames , is a third-person perspective computer role-playing game that is based on third edition Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms rules. It was originally to be published by Interplay Entertainment, but the publisher's financial...
, which was the first MMORPGMMORPGMassively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
to use graphics, was not to debut until a full five years later in 1991). The original game was on the Apple Macintosh, and was followed by AmigaAmigaThe Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
and Atari STAtari STThe Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...
versions; the IBM PC version debuted in 1987. In another major innovation, Kesmai combined Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, and IBM PC players all in the same game, flying against each other. - Multiplayer BattleTech: EGAMultiplayer BattleTech: EGAMultiplayer BattleTech was a PC MMORPG BattleTech game developed by Kesmai and featured on the now defunct GEnie online gaming network. It featured a text-based chat component for roleplaying, team development and battle planning and a 3D battle simulator component. The game engine was based on a...
(1991) — This title takes the Air Warrior concept to land-based Mech combat. The game had some problems with frame rate and latency due to the need for the computer to draw more terrain in land-based displays than it needed to draw when planes are flying in the air and much of the background is plain blue sky.
In the 1990s Kesmai was acquired by News Corp, which later sold it to Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...
. The studio was disbanded, but EA continued to use the Kesmai name as a brand.