Seumas McNally

Developer BIO

Seumas, pronounced "shemmus", was the founder and lone programmer of Longbow Digital Arts which released Tread Marks, a fun mutliplayer tank battle game that won three awards at the Independent Games Festival (IGF). Longbow had been very successful with their previous title DX-Ball 2 and were basically pioneers in independent game developers selling their own software online successfully. Other products Seumas had also programmed included Particle Fire, a screen saver with great graphical effects, Texturizer, for creating wrapping textures, WebProcessor, for creating fast HTML macros, and Tiger's Bane, a game Seumas had worked on for the Amiga platform in BASIC and converted to C in Windows.

Tread Marks had received high reviews from the press, gamers and other programmers as well as its awards, and is known as having one of the best implementations of real-time continuous level of detail in outdoor terrain engines. Seumas had given a lecture on his technology on this aspect at the Game Developer Conference (GDC).

Seumas was only 21, and had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma from the age of 18, as he told it, "about the time I started programming in C". Seumas's love of programming and games is easy to see in his track record; already finishing three commercial games at 21, the latest of which could go head to head with any big production title, he was already an acknowledged talent in game development. Seumas McNally passed away at the age of 21.

The top prize at the yearly Independent Games Festival for the all-round most promising indie game is named after him.

Websites

• In Memory of Seumas McNally -- GameDev.net tribute to Seumas McNally

Games Credited

Rival Ball (2001), Longbow Digital Arts Inc.
Tread Marks (2000), Longbow Digital Arts Inc.
DX-Ball 2 (1999), Longbow Digital Arts Inc.
DX-Ball (1996),
Scorched Tanks (1993), Dark Unicorn Productions