Michael Abrash - Game Programmer

Game Programmer

Before getting into technical writing, Abrash was a game programmer in the early days of the IBM PC. His first commercial game, Space Strike, released in 1982, was a PC booter. He co-authored several PC games with Dan Illowsky who previously wrote Snack Attack for the Apple II. Abrash and Illowsky worked together on Cosmic Crusader (1982), Big Top (1983), and Snack Attack II..

After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. Meantime, Abrash also worked on the popular game Doom. Some of the technology behind Quake is documented in Abrash's Ramblings in Realtime published on the Dr. Dobb's Journal. After Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft to work on natural language research, then moved to the Xbox team, until 2001.

In 2002, Abrash went to work for RAD Game Tools, where he co-wrote the Pixomatic software renderer, which emulates the functionality of a DirectX 7-level graphics card and is used as the software renderer in such games as Unreal Tournament 2004. At the end of 2005, Pixomatic was acquired by Intel. When developing Pixomatic, he and Mike Sartain designed a new architecture called Larrabee, which now is part of Intel's GPGPU project.

Gabe Newell, managing director of Valve, has said that he has "been trying to hire Michael Abrash forever. About once a quarter we go for dinner and I say 'are you ready to work here yet?'" In 2011 Abrash made the move to join Valve.