Einar Saukas

Einar Saukas started developing games at 12 years old, upon learning BASIC and Assembly Z80 from books in 1982. He later graduated in Electronic Engineering and obtained M.Sc. in Computer Science, both at University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. He has been working as software consultant focused on distributed systems for large corporations ever since, including 3 projects awarded at JavaOne Conference with international Duke's Choice Award in 2003, 2005, and 2012.

Additionally, Einar was co-founder and first President of SouJava from 1999 to 2003, officially recognized by Sun Microsystems and later Oracle Corporation as the world's largest Java Users Group. He has also been a speaker at 50 technical conference presentations in Brazil and other countries, including ACM/IEEE Supercompeting, COMDEX, JAVAONE, and others.

Concurrently with his professional career in IT, Einar was involved in several parallel activities related to gaming. From 1998 to 2004, he was a freelance writer at Info Exame (the leading technology magazine in Brazil at the time, with 200,000 printed copies per month on average). He was responsible for writing the magazine gaming section, publishing about 100 game reviews and articles.

In 1997 he co-founded independent studio Black Widow Games, co-authoring 14 contract-work Quake and Half-Life mods for customers Rysher Entertainment, PC Gamer, CNET, and Sony Pictures, including USS DARKSTAR and They Hunger series. The most recent release was Sprace Game, a multi-platform educational game sponsored by the Brazilian government to help teach quantum physics to high-school students.

As an indie developer, Einar has also released independently more than 70 free games, development tools and open source engines. In 2015, he had 7 games licensed for bundled distribution within the Vega console. In December 2015, British magazine Micro Mart awarded his independent game Pixel Quest the award "best retro game of the year".