Walter Reid - Bio

Background

I was born in the late 70’s in Brooklyn, NY. My family, consisting of my loving parents and two older sisters, moved to a suburb of New York City, when I was 6 months old. When I graduated High School and went to College I studied Mathematics and Computer Science. The school had an intelligent and dedicated faculty and I made many lasting friendships with them. The only unexpected setback was the pace at which we were taught. I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. My insatiable curiosity towards programming led me to eat up any books I found on the subject—Assembly, Networking, Win32 API, Compilers and especially Artificial Intelligence. By the time I took my first C++ programming class I already had a solid foundation in the subject.

I flew through my homework early and used that extra time to stay up late at night programming games and small demos. One of the first games I created was a clone of a text based game called Tele-Arena which was popular during the Bulletin Board System (BBS) era. Soon I followed up with a clone of Trade Wars – another popular BBS game. However, I learned that text based games, although fun in themselves, did not posses enough of a challenge and I switched to Windows based graphics—first using the GDI and then on to DirectX 4. I quickly became adept at plotting pixels, drawing lines and creating effects such as simple animations with textures. However, it soon became apparent that more knowledge would be needed and I bought my first game programming book by Andres Lamothe.

My passion for learning led me to become proficient in a variety of languages and other systems. After learning C/C++ I went on to learn Java/VB – Perl/ASP/PHP/Python – MASM/NASM/TASM/ – HTML/DHTML/XML/JavaScript/FLASH and many others. I expanded to web development and server side programming to be more desirable to employers. I took a class in database fundamentals and learned ODBC, another API, and created my first website http://www.JokeCentral.com to show off my programming prowess and incorporate my love of jokes. Upkeep for this site was very expensive for a college student and I sold it 2 years later for an honest fee to the owner of another joke site.

I spent my last year at school working on my senior thesis which dealt heavily with AI and path finding routines. I also met my girlfriend an aspiring film director, the love of my life and future fiancé (she wants you to know she’s also a writer). I was honored to be among those selected for the Undergraduate Research Award later that year for my work I did on the subject. I then went on to NYU for graduate studies in Computer Science.

None of what I accomplished would have been possible without the support of my family, friends, professors at College and NYU and especially my college sweet heart.

I now work on the online games team for MTV Networks – That includes Vh1, MTV, Comedy Central, Spike, Addicting Games and Others – My wonderful sweet heart is also now my wife :)

This site is dedicated to those people—Thank you.