Glyn Anderson

Glyn Anderson has designed, programmed, and managed the production of entertainment products for video game consoles starting with the Intellivision, as well as for PCs from the early MS-DOS days to the present. A musician as well as a programmer, he also created the cross-platform sound and music driver called OminiMusic that was used on many of Activision titles between 1989 and 1992, including Ghostbusters II and Lexi-Cross.

Anderson started making games in 1980 as one of the programmers at APh Technological Consulting, the company that created the Intellivision for Mattel and games including Land Battle and Adventures of Tron. He then worked at Activision with David Crane and Steve Cartwright, creating Atari 800 and Commodore 64 versions of some of their games such as Megamania, Ghostbusters and Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers.

Some of the more unconventional games he has worked on include Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! with Steve Meretzky and Mutant League Hockey, a sports game that parodies NHL teams with athletes that are monsters, robots and skeletons. Both of these games attracted cult followings.

A couple of noteworthy games Anderson worked on were Aliens and Golden Nugget. Aliens for the Commodore 64 came out soon after the second Alien movie in 1986, being built by a team in a then unheard of time of just 80 days. The Activision studio members really wanted to make a game after seeing the movie, but were told that Activision UK had already been assigned the project. By moving quickly, the US team beat the overseas team to market. Golden Nugget, released in 1995, was very innovative in its use of full motion video and video compositing. Real people were videotaped as players against a green screen, allowing game players to interact with onscreen players and computer generated elements like chips and cards. The game also included a one-hour movie starring Adam West, best known as TV’s Batman. The original development team (which evolved over the two-year process) was all women, very unusual at the time.

In addition to his work as a programmer, Anderson has held executive positions at major game publishing companies including Activision,and Infogrames. He was Director of Technology at Accolade, which later became Infogrames. He has also previously founded and operated a video game development company in California called Abalone Entertainment Software Development, and began and ran Matahari Studios in Indonesia.

Anderson’s current company, Game Production Services, creates Location-based Immersive Virtual Experience (LIVE) training simulations, such as the Infantry Immersive Trainer and Joint Fires & Effects Trainer System (JFETS), primarily for the U.S. military.