Samuel S. Nova

I have been programming games professionally since I finished my education in 1992, but my interest for games and programming goes back to 1981/82 when my dad bought a Sinclair ZX81, then later a Commodore C64 and an Amiga.

I would say I first really joined the games business back in 1992 where I and some of my friends started our own company in Denmark, called Brain Bug. At that time I was still rather 'green' regarding games development so most of the time at Brain Bug was Research & Development for me, and damn I learned a lot, things that I still use today.

The first real game project I worked on was Super Star Wars. I had to port it from Super Nintendo to PC. It was my first real project and I faced many problems, but eventually I managed to do an quite impressive and improved PC version of it, which I am still quite proud of today. Unfortunately, LucasArts decided not to release it.

In 1995 Brain Bug was bought up by Softgold and the whole team moved to Germany to start working for them. My first job at Softgold was to do some R&D on the Playstation to understand what this hardware was capable of. During my research I converted a PC title called VidGrid to the Playstation. Unfortunately the project was turned down by Sony. I also spent a lot of time working with compression on the PC, including images and movies.

After some time in Germany, I decided to move on and moved to Ireland where I joined Funcom Dublin. I stayed there almost 3 years and most of the time was spent working on Championship Motocross featuring Ricky Carmichael. The game got published by THQ in 1999, just after I left Funcom.

From Ireland the trip went to Switzerland 1999 where I founded Novalicious because I planned to work as a freelance games programmer. The reason why I moved to Switzerland was pretty simple, to share my life with Kirsten, the woman of my life. The very first project I got was MicroMachines V3 for GBC. All programming was done by me except from the menu system (same system as on the consoles) which was done by Manfred Trenz. The game was developed for THQ and released in 2000. The next job came shortly after finishing MMV3, I got a call from one of Funcom’s producers asking me to join them for 5 months to help working on CMX 2 (Championship Motocross.... 2), which I did. When the project was done, I went back to my family in Switzerland and started another project for a good friend of mine who had his own small games company in Denmark. The game was An American Tail: Fievel's Gold Rush for GBA, which got published in 2001 by Conspiracy Entertainment. After finishing Fievel, I scored my next job, a short time contract deal with DarkWorks. My job was to assist them with the Playstation version of Alone in the Dark 4, mainly with some compression methods.

In 2001, I moved into another area in the games business: mobile gaming. I did some contract work for THQ / Siemens where I implemented a GameAPI for Siemens’ very first Java phone. I designed and implemented all the native code, with support from Siemens who took care of the Java interface.

Later, I got contacted by Jürgen Goeldner who just founded Mobile Scope AG while I was working on the GameAPI. I decided to join Mobile Scope a few months later.

I worked at Mobile Scope as Technical Director. At the very beginning I worked as producer/coordinator on a few titles, and then my role changed as the company grew. Here I was in charge of the technical issues regarding development and helping internal and external development teams. I was also working on full game titles, either as single programmer, lead programmer or helping programmer. Some of the titles I was involved in that I'm proud of would be IonHawk and Wizardry. Mobile Scope was bought by In-Fusio early 2005.

In June 2005 I decided to leave Mobile Scope/In-Fusio to join Nephin Games. So early August 2005 I went to Ireland (again), this time to Galway to meet the people at Nephin. The main reasons for this move was thatduring the last 3 years I had been talking to the CEO (Alan Duggan) at Nephin and had a good feeling about the kind of games he wanted to make, and it appealed to me. This, together with a small company and good business plans, made things easy. I will still be working on mobile phones at Nephin but will also get involved with the server side of the games. To reflect my focus now, my title will be 'Director of Development - Devices'. Oh, and I'm very lucky as I will still be based in Switzerland.

Based on the bio on the novalicious website.