Tony Warriner | |
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Born | October 19, 1968 |
Occupation | Video game designer |
Known for | Revolution Software |
Notable work | Broken Sword, Beneath a Steel Sky |
Spouse | Tanya Riarey |
Website | http://tonywarriner.io/ |
Tony Warriner (born 19 October 1968, Malton) is a British video game designer, programmer and co-founder of Revolution Software. At a young age he started playing adventure games, when they were just text adventures. He wrote his first game, Obsidian, while he was at school and sent it to Artic Computing for consideration. Artic's director, Charles Cecil, loved the game and convinced him to license it to Artic, and then to join Artic as a programmer. At Artic he wrote, together with Adam Waring, Ultima Ratio which was published in 1987 by Firebird. In the same year he got a job at Cecil's Paragon Programming, where games from US publishers were converted to European platforms. When Cecil had left to work for U.S. Gold, Warriner started doing 8-bit programming for games. In 1988 he created Death Stalker, published by Codemasters. In the same year he joined Cascade Games, where he worked on 19 Part One: Boot Camp, Arcade Trivia Quiz, and Arcade Trivia Quiz Question Creator. In 1989 Warriner moved to Bytron Aviation Systems based in Kirmington, Lincolnshire, where he wrote software for the aviation industry, David Sykes was his fellow programmer.
In March 1990 Cecil, Sykes, Noirin Carmody and Warriner founded Revolution Software. For their first game he wrote an innovative engine, called Virtual Theatre, which enabled the gameworld to be more active and dynamic than was previously possible. The game's title became Lure of the Temptress and it was published in 1992. It was followed by a string of other critically and commercially successful adventure games, including Beneath a Steel Sky, the Broken Sword series, In Cold Blood and Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado. Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars are often both referred to as one of the best adventures of all time, appearing on numerous "top" adventure game lists and receiving several awards and nominations. Warriner (with others) received a nomination for Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2004 and for Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director’s Cut at the British Academy Video Games Awards in 2010.
With Steve Ince he began to explore new ideas and in 2006 he founded 720games to publish their own gaming projects. In the same year he presented his game Blocster, a single player puzzle game. Besides his work on new editions of Beneath a Steel Sky and the first two Broken Sword Games (2009/2010), he worked on various games that weren't developed by Revolution, including A Christmas Carol and Sticky Blocks. In 2023 Warriner published a memoir of his career in the games industry to the present time, entitled - Revolution: The Quest For Game Development Greatness. His current project is an Action-adventure game game called, Wormhole Dungeon.