Don R. Gilman

Developer BIO

Don started gaming with Avalon Hill’s France 1940 in 1975. His first publication credit included Avalon Hill’s FlatTop and The General. He started writing for The Journal of WWII (later 20th Century) Wargaming as a reviewer and tournament designer/judge. He has been playing the Harpoon system since 1978. His computer gaming contributions include: Orbiter, PT109, Sub Battle Simulator, and The Shard of Spring (all in the 80’s). Don created many of the original design elements of the original Harpoon in 1989, and again for the current Harpoon 3 Professional.

Don graduated in 1984 from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering. He is one of a few dozen licensed Software Engineers. His day job is herding a dozen programmers at Texas A&M’s Energy Systems Lab. In the evenings he runs Advanced Gaming Systems. He is the veteran of five startups, three of which were gaming firms. Don’s commercial IT clients included US Federal Agencies, the Fortune 500, and many smaller firms in Texas. Technology areas included Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), data acquisition, robotics, modeling, imaging, voice transcription, billing, and bio-informatics.

He feels that it is unfair to be considered a geek as he no longer codes, married a musician who is smarter than he is and they produced two children who are clearly smarter than both of them. For fun he brews beer, cooks, sails, cycles, and in his “spare time” reads and games SciFi and Military.

Also Known As

• Don Gilman
• UncleHarpoon
• D. R. Gilman

Websites

• Advanced Gaming Systems Inc. -- Developers of all versions of Computer Harpoon

Games Credited

Larry Bond's Harpoon Commander's Edition (2007), Matrix Games
Harpoon Classic '97 (1996), Alliance Interactive, Inc., Interactive Magic
Harpoon Classic (1995), Renegade Software
Empire Deluxe Scenarios (1993), New World Computing, Inc.
Harpoon Battleset 3: The MED Conflict (1991), Electronic Arts Ltd.
Harpoon Challenger Pak (Limited Edition) (1991), Three-Sixty Pacific, Inc.
Harpoon (1989), Three-Sixty Pacific, Inc.
PT-109 (1987), Spectrum Holobyte, Inc.
Sub Battle Simulator (1987), Epyx, Inc.
Orbiter (1986), Spectrum Holobyte, Inc.
Shard of Spring (1986), Strategic Simulations, Inc.