Over months of interviews and research, I got to know the names behind the credits screens on each Quake game. These profiles dig deeper into a developer's career beyond analysis of id Software's culture and the Quake franchise.

Graeme Devine and Steve Jobs share at least four things in common. They were both entrepreneurs, Devine founding his first company before he was old enough to drive. They both worked at Atari (and I suspect Devine wore shoes to work and bathed regularly, though I didn't think to ask). They both extolled the virtues of Jobs' NeXTSTEP operating system, years ahead of its time. And they both knew John Carmack.

Jobs was the one who introduced Devine and Carmack, leading to Devine's tenure at id Software where he "herded," in his words, Quake 3 to completion in 1999. Quake 3 is widely regarded as one of the greatest first-person shooters and competitive games of all time. Devine is proud of his team's work on the game, but his accomplishments in the industry pre-date Quake arenas by almost 20 years.

I talked to Devine about his early dabbling in programming and game design, the perfect storm of events that enabled him and his business partner to create CD-ROM sensation The 7th Guest, and where solitaire fits into his epitaph.

Graeme Devine.

What led to your interest in game development?

Graeme Devine: Back in the 1970s, my father worked with computers. He had an old NCR [National Cash Register] computer, and the only way you could program was through binary code typed on a teletype. There was one game on it where you'd press a key when a red light came on, and it would print out on the teletype, "Speedy Gonzales!" or "You cheated," or "You're slow." Three responses. That got me interested in games.

They upgraded to an ICL [International Computers Limited] mainframe, which had [Colossal Cave] Adventure on it. I started to play that, and from that point I was hooked. I got a TRS-80 and taught myself Z80 assembly code and just started to write games. I actually tried to make movies first, with a camera. I built models from Battlestar Galactica, the space set and so forth. I was terrible at that, but I could learn Z-80 code and learn how to [make my stories] come true on a TRS-80 screen.

The rest is history. It's all I've ever done.

I just published a book called Break Out about the Apple II's influence on games and hardware. The first chapter covers the "holy trinity" from 1977: The Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET. I'm curious: what made you gravitate to the TRS-80?

Graeme Devine: Access. Purely access. I was able to get one for cheap, and I would have gone for any computer that had a keyboard at that point. In the UK there were a bunch of them, like the Nascom 1 and 2 that you could build as do-it-yourself kits. There was the Acorn, the Atom, and of course the Apple IIe. I did get [an Apple II] to write games for the Spectrum, because those computers were too small to type on properly. When I got some royalty checks, that was when I got my Apple II to program on. I also got a CPM card and 16K of RAM.

The ZX Spectrum's hardware was tucked away inside its notoriously cramped keyboard.

What were those royalty checks from? What were some of your first games?

Graeme Devine: Firebirds on the Spectrum, Space Junk 3D, Pole Position on the Spectrum, Wool Blazer on the Spectrum. A bunch of games for the Amstrad; Pole Position on PC. I helped on the Commodore 64 and the Microsoft MSX version. I did adventure games on the PC, such as Metropolis, Turbo Champions, and a whole bunch of games that took six weeks to write back then, and it was just you. It was awesome.

How did you sell those first games?

Graeme Devine: At the market, in plastic Baggies, for 50 pence. A friend of mine, Andy, was publishing his games through a company called Softek [Software]. He introduced me to Tim Lang Bell, and he published my first games on the Spectrum on the Softek label. After that I started my own company.

I've started four of my own companies to publish games. My first company in the UK [ended when] my partner got addicted to cocaine. At the second company, people stole money from me. That was the end of that company because I just left. The third company did well and continued after I went for the states. Once in the states, I started again from scratch.

How old were you when you started your first company?

Graeme Devine: I think 14.

I've read that you got a job at Atari when you were 16. How were you able to start there so young?

Graeme Devine: I was doing Fly Birds for Softek. There was an ad in Computing Today or something for engineers at Atari. I answered that ad by making a demo of a 3D car going around a track on a Sinclair Spectrum. I took that into Atari, and they were like, "Whoa. Okay, you're hired."

Growing up in the '90s, I remember two FMV-based games that I loved and that were considered two of the only good FMV-based games. Those were Gabriel Knight 2, and 7th Guest. 7th Guest was interesting because along with Myst, it's credited with making CD-ROM drives ubiquitous. How did that project start?

Graeme Devine: I think we'd been circling around larger games on floppy disc. It was getting ridiculous in the PC industry at that point: Games were shipping on 20 floppies. It was getting to be a problem. Rob [Landeros, co-creator and co-founder of Trilobyte] and I went to a multimedia conference was announcing the CDI, and that was going to be the big savior of everything. We went to the conference and sat through the Phillips presentations, and they were all about encyclopedia and text search, that patent-pending file search for CD-ROMs.

That seemed to Rob and I to be the wrong thing. There was this new storage medium that had 485 megabytes; that was the amount you could burn on the first round of discs. We thought it would be good for images and for adventures, being able to do things like that. On TV at the time, there was the Twin Peaks show that both Rob and I loved. Virgin MasterTronics, who we worked for at the time, had the license to Clue under the [Australian developer] Melbourne House label. Rob and I said, "We'll do a version of Clue that has a Twin Peaks feel to it."

We approached Martin [Alper], who was the CEO of Virgin Games, and came up with a game design for a project called Guest. It was a little like Clue, and it was CD-ROM based for PC. He took us to lunch and made us an offer we couldn't refuse. He basically fired us and gave us a contract to go make it.

FMV was, in retrospect, a polarizing tech. The games industry has always had an inferiority complex because of comparisons to Hollywood and film, and FMV was supposed to present this merger of gameplay and Hollywood graphics, but few of those games are remembered fondly. 7th Guest is an exception. Were you looking to work with FMV?

Graeme Devine: No. Initially, we were going to use a camera that would take 360-degree shots of rooms, and use QuickTime to do circular views of rooms and scroll around. It turned out those cameras were really expensive to rent. [laughs] We said, "We should use rendering." Along came 3D Studio. It ran in DOS back then, and it let you render out animations. We said, "Okay, we'll try this." That was how we accidentally fell into FMV.

I remember buying Doom on four floppies, and the first Gabriel Knight on 11. Then I got Gabriel Knight on a CD, and I said, "That's nice, condensing 11 disks onto one CD-ROM." Then came Gabriel Knight 2, which was on six CDs. It was almost like that same problem happened with CDs but exponentially faster. I'm interested in the compression technique that you used to fit 7th Guest on two CDs.

Graeme Devine: I was very big into all sorts of compression techniques. I'd made a version of the animator for 3D Studio that fit in 20K, and compressed down the animations that 3D Studio put out. Autodesk had given us a license for that. So, I continued to play with animation formats. In the end, we could have shipped 7th Guest on one CD, but Martin said, "No! Consumers want two CDs. You've got to split it in two."

I don't know if you remember, but we added a whole bunch of Redbook audio from the Batman onto the second disc. That was awesome. That was fantastic.

Full Deck Solitaire by GRL Games, Inc., Devine's fourth startup.

One of your claims to fame from back then, besides awesome compression techniques, was a Scooby-Doo-themed wardrobe. How'd that become a look for you?

Graeme Devine: I've really got to update my Wikipedia page. [laughs] In the '90s, I used to wear a lot of Scooby-Doo shirts because my daughter and I watched it a lot. That's where the Scooby-Doo thing came from. I still love it—who doesn't love Scooby-Doo?—but when my Wikipedia page started, I saw that [factoid] there, and thought, Wow. This was written by someone who knew me in the '90s.

Another claim to fame is that, looking at your resume, you've been able to work on so many platforms, in so many genres, and with so many properties. Was that a goal of yours early on, to get to work on myriad types of projects?

Graeme Devine: It's been something I've been lucky enough to do. About 10 years ago, I realized I had this luck. I've done shooters, I've done RTS games, I've done RPGs—I've done all these types of games. I realized at that point that our industry was changing. It's, "I'm the guy who does the smoke effects on guns." It becomes common to work on a type of game because those are the types of games you love. But I'd made all sorts of games, and I really liked that about my career. I ended up making a solitaire game.

On my gravestone, I want it to say: "He made a lot of different games, and a really good Solitaire game."

Speaking of shooters, how did you come to work at id Software?

Graeme Devine: Actually, Steve Jobs introduced John [Carmack] and I to each other in the 1990s. We both used NeXTSTEP computers. He was in Mesquite, Texas, working on Quake, and we started emailing each other. He would send me screenshots of Quake in the NeXTSTEP [development environment], with the tagline "Coming at you in real-time." He liked 7th Guest, but thought it was limited because it was pre-rendered; he wanted the future to be in real-time. I admired that because he was such a super-smart person.

I would go out to visit Texas and take a look at what they were doing, even swap code every now and again. I'd say, "This is what I should use for that solution." We had a very friendly relationship, When Trilobyte came to an end, I was looking around for what to do next, and John was like, "Well, we need someone at id to help us herd Quake 3 to completion. I think you can do that."