L. Allen McPheeters

Allen McPheeters started in the industry as a junior level programmer at Sierra On-Line's Oakhurst, CA facility in the summer of 1987. Initially, he was to port Mixed Up Mother Goose from the PC to the Apple IIe; however, the PC version was not finished until late fall. In the meantime, he worked on designing and programming (or videotaping) a number of demonstration programs of Sierra's fall product line.

In December, shortly before work on MUMG was to begin, McPheeters accepted a job with Cinemaware as a QA analyst. His boss there was Patrick Cook, a fraternity brother from Purdue University. McPheeters stayed worked primarily as a tester on ports of Cinemaware's first round of products (Defender of the Crown, King of Chicago, SDI, and Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon), and on new original versions of titles like Rocket Ranger, The Three Stooges, and Lords of the Rising Sun. He began to move into design by re-working some of the arcade sequences in ports of Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon, and into user documentation on TV Sports: Football.

After two years, McPheeters began to grow disillusioned with making games, and, upon being laid off from Cinemaware, spent nearly a year and a half out of the industry. A call in July 1991 from Pat Cook brought him back to game development, this time as a game designer at Dynamix. Cook and McPheeters created the Front Page Sports series, first Football and then Baseball. McPheeters' most important contribution to the product line was the development of Career Play, which allowed the user to play multiple seasons in which his players would age and retired, to be replaced by new rookie players. Football was a four-time Sports Game of the Year winner in Computer Gaming World, and was named to the magazine's Hall of Fame. McPheeters took the lead in designing Baseball Pro '94.

In summer 1995, McPheeters accepted an offer from Viacom New Media, and went to work at the Chicago-based development house for six months, but no products came of his time there. The following February, he returned to work with Cook at Dynamix, this time working on a real-time strategy game, Outpost 2: Divided Destiny. After this game shipped, he worked on help file localization for Front Page Sports: Ski Racing and Red Baron 2 until an opportunity to transfer to Sierra's Renton, WA-based Synergistic Software in February 1998.

At Synergistic, McPheeters sadly closed down production of a revamped edition of Baseball Pro (the product line had been renamed Sierra Sports), and watched helplessly as Football Pro '99 shipped and was almost immediately recalled due to bugginess. Most of the Synergistic staff, including McPheeters, was laid off in February 1999.

In July, McPheeters was hired as a game designer to work on Microsoft Baseball 2001. This game combined the career play elements of Baseball Mogul with the existing Microsoft Baseball arcade game. Sales were disappointing, however, and Microsoft moved from Windows development to Xbox development. McPheeters took the role of program manager for a new baseball product with an external developer; the project eventually shipped as MLB Inside Pitch. McPheeters left the project after ten months; the program manager role was not a good fit. In August 2001, he left Microsoft and the industry as well.

In March 2004, Canadian-based developer Exile Interactive hired McPheeters as the senior designer on a new GameCube-based baseball game, Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball. At this writing, the product is about to be released.