Beware of prophets wearing rubber clothing

William Nealy

Hello my name is Steve Hales. Igor Labs is my one man company. Once there was two, now there is one.

Igor, always the dutiful assistant to Doctor Frankenstein decided one day to revolt and start his own lab, throwing down the shackles and releasing the monster. Igor's Software Laboratories was born.

I've been playing with computers since 1977. Some of my first experiences were with small hand built computers. KIM-1, Imsai, Apple II, and a few large computers like the Nova 210.

In 1981 I was offered a job to reverse engineer the Atari 2600 (VCS) and to work in a small unknown industry making video games. So I quit college to be in the games business. I was 19. Little did I know the games industry would turn into a 9 billion dollar a year whirlwind, as of 2002. Larger than Hollywood!

My professional field of interest is in the Consumer Software programming arena. My first entertainment product was for an Atari VCS (2600) game machine working with Starpath's Supercharger. The cart that let you load games via cassettes. My first product was Suicide Mission, an asteroids clone.

I then went on to create products for Synapse Software on the Atari 800, Commodore 64, Apple II and finally the IBM PC JR!

If anyone remembers: Fort Apocalypse , Slime, Dimension X, I coded and designed them with Ihor Wolosenko. I also coded and co-designed Mindwheel with Robert Pinksy, the famed poet and author. Working with Robert changed the way I read and write words forever. He was writing History of my Heart during the development of Mindwheel, so they have familiar themes. You can even get a deeper meaning behind Mindwheel, by reading this book. Although, he claims, they are not connected.

Because of the 'rise of the emulator', these old games and many others are available. You can get them here.

After Synapse was bought by Brøderbund (We were their first affiliate label!) I went and did couple of projects with Brøderbund. Amiga Fantavision, which was a precursor to the entire author based multimedia industry, and after a vacation at a small startup, GO Corp, which was trying to create the first PDA, I came back and worked with Dane Bigham, Chris Schardt, Scott Shumway, and Ed Murphy of Presage software on BannerMania for the Macintosh. I also began working on Type Twister for Adobe with Sapien Technologies Paul Lamoreux and Ferdinand Rios.

I first became interested in audio in 1983 after buying and playing with a alphaSyntauri. Which was a hardware wavtable synthesizer that used an Apple II as its host and two audio cards. I then borrowed a Korg Polysix, which was a pre MIDI device and a modern analog synth. I then bought a Yamaha DX7, and then an Ensoniq Mirage, which was a sampler. I was hooked.

In 1991 I wanted to start using personal computers to create and control audio, in all kinds of applications. So I found a similar mad scientist in Jim Nitchals and together we invented the SoundMusicSys audio driver and wavetable synthesizer, which later became the Beatnik Audio Engine (BAE). It was the first MIDI based software wavtable synthesizer commerically released for personal computers. It ran on a orignal Macintosh. Presage, Inc was the first developer to use it, and Brøderbund actually spent time creating the music and sound effects in the format that later became RMF. The first product was Prince of Persia released on 1992, then Lemmings! Maxis was the second, and it first appeared in RoboSport and in its final form in SimAnt. During that time I got to work with some great people. Will Wright, Ed Kilham, Fred Haslam, Brian Elher.

With Jim Nitchals, we wrote the Audio chapter for the book "Tricks of the Mac Programming Guru's" from Hayden Press.

Jim Nitchals and I founded Igor's Software Laboratories to explore this new audio technology and place it into interesting places. We licensed it to Apple for use in Quicktime, WebTV, Be, Adobe, and may others.

In 1997, Jim and I merged our technology with Beatnik, the company co-founded by Thomas Dolby to turn our cool technology into a audio system for the web, and the Beatnik Audio Engine was born. It became the the native foundation for JavaSound, and now its found life in the mobile handset industry. Versions of our audio engine are now in Nokia phones and the Hiptop from Danger.

I've worked with some great people at Beatnik. Chris Muir, Andrew Ezekiel Rostaing, Chris Grigg, Chris Van Rensburg, Mark Deggeller, Doug Scott, and John Cooper. All engineers with a crazy passion for audio. I miss them all!

In the last few years I've been building audio based control systems for use in location based entertainment. In 1998, for a group called The Haunt, I created seven custom applications, created content and designed various audio effect layouts. We had over 2000 people come visit, and it was a great success.

In late 2001, I joined an interesting company. Danger, Inc. Makers of the Hiptop/Sidekick, an amazing mobile phone sold by T-Mobile.

Recently I've done a small bit of sound effects editing for a Burning Man project called, Ping, a submarine art car.

Here's my resume if you're looking for someone like me, or if you've got an interesting project to work on, please contact me.

Ask me anything, if I don't know the answer, I'll find it.

Aloha,
Steve