Adrian Stephens is a veteran
video games programmer who has worked on formats from the
BBC Micro onwards, through to the
PC and 'next generation' consoles. He is currently the president and lead programmer at
Santa Monica codeshop
Luxoflux.
Adrian was introduced to coding in 1979, and began experimenting with his school's Research Machines 380Z before purchasing his very own BBC Micro. In his teenage years he wrote games (presumably in his bedroom) and submitted them to the small publishers of the time. While taking a maths degree at Bristol University, he indulged in his hobby of cloning arcade games for the home computer (a common practice in the early 8-bit market when coders were regretably often short of inspiration). These included Mr Ee (a Mr Do! clone and his favourite BBC project) and Crazy Painter (a clone of Amidar).
Towards the latter part of the 1980's, Stephens, as part of the development team The Assembly Line, worked on a number of highly ambitious projects for the 16-bit machines (the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST), including the highly original Interphase. At this time Stephens was able to use his maths background to develop efficient 3D routines in assembly language, which allowed for The Assembly Line's games to feature techniques not seen much before (such as Interphase's ellipses, and Stunt Island's ultra-fast gouraud shading).
Stunt Island, a hugely groundbreaking flight sim-cum-movie studio toolkit developed for the PC (for Disney Software) proved to be a difficult project, taking a long time to complete and resulting in the collapse of The Assembly Line shortly after.
After a stint working at Sega of America (most notably on the stylish scrolling beat-'em-up Comix Zone), Stephens formed Luxoflux Corp. in 1997 to develop games for the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 (and later the Sega Dreamcast and subsequent machines). Their games have generally involved vehicular combat (Vigilante 8 and Star Wars: Demolition series). He will hopefully one day be persuaded to write a new version of Stunt Island.
An incomplete softography
Unreleased/unfinished projects
EPT ('
Elite Piss Take') - Amiga/ST space opera, canned during development
Qube - internet multiplayer action game, canned when The Assembly Line split up
A 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Sega Saturn
Companies
The Assembly Line (with
Andy Beveridge,
Martin Day and
John Daley)
Luxoflux Corp. (founded 1997)