Who Am I?

My name is Sean Huxter and life began for me when I got my Commodore 64 and realized I could program it.

Of course that's a vast oversimplification. I grew up in a small town in Newfoundland, had a wonderful childhood traipsing around the hills and vales, riding my bike and having generally a great time.

In my teens I did a one-year Commercial Art program and did rather well, but I didn't have much ambition, or to put it more accurately, much hope that my vocation would lead to a career, not living in such a remote place. So I worked at a Radio Shack outlet for two years where by complete accident I learned to program in BASIC on a TRS-80 and a Color Computer. Bought a Commodore 64 (because it had the best combination of features and price at the time) and began programming games right away.

Having realized I could program, I entered Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1984 to get a Computer Science Degree which I did, with a rare Minor in English Lit.

During the summer break after my first year of college I programmed several computer games including one text adventure called Piracy which I now call Piracy 1.0, in BASIC with a two-word parser.

But what really defined me were the things I did when I was not studying.

Using a Koala Pad I painted computer graphics, and when I graduated I got a job doing graphics for a local advertising and production company where I worked for 7 years.

While there I learned 3D modeling and animation using Lightwave. I did several TV ads using that technology, some of which were quite fun to do and the results were quite nice.

I used that knowledge to land a job in Massachusetts at a company that was, at the time, called Second Nature Interactive, which soon changed to Turbine Entertainment Inc. which published Asheron's Call, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. I was hired as an animator, and became the lead artist.

Twelve years later I'm still there, having published three successful games: Asheron's Call, Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach and Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. I'm still working on those two, though after doing three years of live updates for Asheron's Call I moved onto LOTRO, worked on that a while until they needed me on DDO, then when that published it was back to again. On those games I did almost every aspect of technical art including animation and particle effects. Today I work doing Technical Art for those two games, and anything else that's needed.

I'm married to a wonderful woman and have a 12-year-old daughter who did some work helping test this game. They're my favorite people in the world.

Piracy ©1985,2008 Sean Huxter