David "Talin" Joiner (born June 1958) is an American game programmer, who created games such as '' The Faery Tale Adventure'' and '' Inherit the Earth'', contributed audio to '' Defender of the Crown II'' (1993), engineering for '' SimCity 4: Rush Hour'' (2003), and '' The Sims 2: University'' (2005).

Career as programmer

Joiner learned Assembler, Fortran, and

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily ...

programming between 1976 and 1980 at the

Strategic Air Command Strategic Air Command (SAC) was a United States Department of Defense Specified Command and a United States Air Force (USAF) Major Command responsible for command and control of the strategic bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile compon ...

headquarters in

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. In his spare time, he coded a space war game on terminals. At the location, he also became familiar with coding on

Commodore PET The Commodore PET is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read-only memory, keyboard, monochrome monitor ...

and the

Apple II Apple II ("apple Roman numerals, two", stylized as Apple ][) is a series of microcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1977 to 1993. The Apple II (original), original Apple II model, which gave the series its name, was designed ...

. After leaving the military, he joined Datasoft, DataSoft and worked in a professional programmer environment. He then became part of IntelliCreations, and then Mindscape (company), Mindscape, then began working on the Amiga 1000 and with MicroIllusions, which started out from a computer store in

San Fernando Valley The San Fernando Valley, known locally as the Valley, is an urbanized valley in Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County, California. Situated to the north of the Los Angeles Basin, it comprises a large portion of Los Angeles, the Municipal corpo ...

. According to ''The Digital Antiquarian'', "The seeds of MicroIllusions were planted during one day’s idle conversation when Steinert complained to David Joiner that, while the Amiga supposedly had

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

built into its

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

, he had never actually heard his machines talk.... He proved as good as his word within a few hours. Impressed, Steinert asked if he could sell the new program in his store for a straight 50/50 split. When the program sold well, Steinert decided to get into Amiga software development in earnest with the help of Joiner." Joiner then began working on ''The Faery Tale Adventure'', which took him seven months. MicroIllusions published The Faery Tale Adventure first in 1986. In 1988, he wrote Discovery, an educational music editor related to the game. Joiner appeared on television of the Computer Chronicles to demonstrate Music-X. He later published under ''Sylvan Technical Arts''. He worked a year on The Sims 2, then left EA. More recently, he worked on the user interface of

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Publications

In 1998 Joiner published ''Real interactivity in interactive entertainment''.

References

External links

David Joiner's homepageDavid Joiner
at

MobyGames MobyGames is a commercial website that catalogs information on video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controlle ...

David Joiner & Music-X Amiga Based Sequencer
(On television show Computer Chronicles) {{DEFAULTSORT:Joiner, David 1958 births American video game designers American video game programmers Electronic Arts employees Google employees Living people American role-playing designers American software engineers