Stargate Worlds :: Bios and Pics :: Conan Brink

I've been a sci-fi / fantasy / gaming geek all my life. I grew up in the San Francisco area, where I started programming at the ripe old age of nine. At fifteen, I did some contract programming work on such exciting projects as Fairchild's pension plan and software to manage teachers' grade books.

In 1990, while I was in college (majoring in graphics programming), I became a beta tester for The Sierra Network, an online game network that was headquartered near Yosemite. My bug reports contained enough useful information that they kept me on through several cycles. During this time, I got to chatting with one of the regular customers, a wonderful lady who lived down in Orange County. Shortly after this, I noticed that one of the people I was communicating with at the company had changed titles from "systems programmer" to "director of systems programming," so I asked if there were any openings. I applied, got the job, dropped out of college, moved to the mountains, and married that wonderful woman from Orange County.

TSN started me out doing graphics work, adding features to their interpreter. Then they moved me to modem drivers, and then across the wire to server work, which I discovered I really enjoy doing. In the mid-1990s, we migrated all our servers from extended DOS to Unix boxes from Sun. In the process, we got a chance to redesign all the code to be much more flexible and scalable.

AOL bought us up in 1996 and changed our name to WorldPlay. In about 2000, I got loaned out to Electronic Arts to work on ea.com, helping to port our games and other AOL games over. After that contract was up, I joined AOL Music for about a year, working on media players that used the Winamp skinning engine.

In 2003, I got the chance to work on a project called Ninth Domain, by Tektonic Studios, and I was reminded just how much fun it is to build an MMO. There were three of us there building the entire server architecture from scratch, all veterans of The Sierra Network.

In 2005, I heard about a position that combined several interesting things:

Build an MMORPG (an exciting and rewarding experience)
based on Stargate (which I had been watching since SG-1 premiered on Showtime)
with a group of seasoned veterans (the name that immediately caught my attention was Joe Ybarra, a name that I remembered from growing up with The Bard's Tale in the 1980s; I had also had the opportunity to work briefly with him at The Sierra Network when his company created two games for our network).

So my wife and I packed up our stuff and moved from the mountains of California to the deserts of Arizona, where I get to work on this great game.

In my off hours, I enjoy playing a variety of obscure games, singing, and trying to teach myself to play the guitar and the mandolin.