Sandy Petersen

Carl Sanford Joslyn Petersen (born September 16, 1955) is a game designer.

Petersen was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended University of California, Berkeley, majoring in zoology.

He is a well-known fan of H. P. Lovecraft, whose work he first encountered in a World War II Armed Services edition of "The Dunwich Horror and other Weird Tales" found in his father's library. In 1974, "Dungeons & Dragons" brought his interest to role-playing games. His interest for role-playing games and H. P. Lovecraft were fused when he became principal author of the game "Call of Cthulhu", published 1981, and many scenarios and background pieces thereafter. While working for Chaosium he co-authored the third edition of "RuneQuest", for which he also co-wrote the critically acclaimed "Trollpak" and a number of other Gloranthan supplements. He still plays and runs role-playing games, and is a frequent guest at conventions where he usually runs a freeform game of his own devising, and/or helps to run someone else's game.

He worked some time for Microprose, where he is credited for work between 1989 and 1992 on the video games "Darklands", "Hyperspeed", "Lightspeed", "Sid Meier's Pirates!" and "Sword of the Samurai". He also made minor contributions to "Civilization".

Primarily interested by the first-person shooter "Wolfenstein 3D", Petersen joined id Software about 10 weeks before the December 1993 release of "Doom" and in that time created 19 levels for it (of which 8 were based to some extent on early drafts by Tom Hall). He later created 17 of the levels for "Doom II", and 7 levels for "Quake". His Lovecraftian influences also resulted in some changes to the monster designs for these games.

He left id Software for Ensemble Studios in June 1997. There, he has worked as a game designer on several of their "Age of Empires" titles, including "Rise of Rome", ', and '. During this time, he was a frequent poster on the Heavengames forums under the username ES_Sandyman. He ran an extremely popular series of threads, "Ask Sandyman", where forum members could ask him about anything they wanted (though there were some questions he did not answer).

Petersen is a Mormon, but his religion has not prevented him from designing games involving Satanic elements. While working on "Doom", he said to John Romero: "I have no problems with the demons in the game. They're just cartoons. And, anyway, "they're" the bad guys."

References

* David Kushner: "Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture", Random House Publishing Group 2003, ISBN 0-375-50524-5

External links

* [http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/august02/gencon/petersen/ GameSpy interview (2002)]
* [http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=6 yog-sothoth.com interview]
* [http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=268 Pen & Paper: Roleplaying Game Credits for Sandy Petersen]
* [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,821/ MobyGames biography]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jehar/LovecraftInQuake#An_Interview_with_Sandy_Petersen Interview on Lovecraft]