Alan Lenton

Alan Lenton is in charge of game design and development and overall technical matters for Interactive Broadcasting. Alan handles all the design for new and existing games, and the programming for new games. He also has responsibility for looking after other programmers doing maintenance work and writing game tools. Unusually for a multi-player game designer, Alan has also written single-player computer games, including the well-received strategy wargame Frontline.

Alan has extensive management, publishing and software design experience, having worked as the manager of a rock band, manager of a bookshop, a graphic designer, and the production editor of a London listings magazine. He was for three years general manager of the UK's first commercial consumer network Compunet, before leaving to concentrate on writing IB's award-winning multi-player game Federation.

Multi-player games Alan has designed include Federation, an adventure/economic simulation set in a future universe; Iron Wolves, a submarine simulation; Age of Adventure, a role-playing game based in Victorian times, now in beta-test; and the forthcoming Barbarossa, a strategy wargame based on the German invasion of Russia in 1941.

Alan has a degree in sociology from Leeds University, which is probably one of the reasons why Interactive Broadcasting's games create true communities, so that IB's multi-player games become real cyberspace societies. Alan has been known to refer to himself as the world's only practicing sociologist!

Alan lives in London, and as well as his work for Interactive Broadcasting, he is a member of the British Standards Institute C++ panel.

A long-standing member and former secretary of the Association of C & C++ Users, he acts as a mentor for programmers learning C++ on their own. He is the chair of a local housing cooperative, a former chair of governers of the local primary school and a trustee of Hounslow and Isleworth United Charities.

Alan is a regular speaker at conferences and seminars, discussing issues affecting multi-player games, open source software and the internet