Seumas McNally

Seumas, pronounced "shemmus", McNally was the founder and lone programmer of Longbow Digital Arts which released Tread Marks, a multiplayer 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 are regarded as pioneers in independent game development selling their own software online successfully. Other products McNally programmed include Particle Fire, a screen saver with great graphical effects, Texturizer, for creating wrapping textures, WebProcessor, for creating fast HTML macros. He created Tiger's Bane in BASIC for the Amiga platform and converted it to C in Windows.

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

McNally had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma on the age of 18, as he told it, "about the time I started programming in C". When he passed away at the age of 21, he was already an acknowledged talent in game development, having finished three commercial games, the latest of which could go head to head with any big production title.

The Grand Prize at the yearly IGF, for the all-round most promising indie game, is named after him.