Don R. Gilman

Don started gaming with Avalon Hill’s France 1940 while in school. 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 1980’s). Don created many of the original design elements of the original Harpoon in 1989, and again for the current Harpoon 3 Professional/H3 MilSim.

Don graduated from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering. He is one of a few dozen licensed Software Engineers. He is the veteran of five start-ups, 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 Geo-spatial 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, runs, and in his “spare time” reads and games SciFi and Military.

Effectively retired from gaming, Don now spends his cycles herding cats from Viasat's campus in Bryan/College Station Texas.