Mumbo Jumbo, the development team working on Myth III: The Wolf Age for Gathering of Developers, announced a key personnel addition to their roster. The company has added skilled Mac game programmer Duane Johnson to their ranks.
Johnson is the programmer who started his Macintosh game development career making the Interplay games Descent and Descent II able to work with 3dfx graphics cards — Johnson released versions of the game based on open-source code releases from the game’s original developer, Parallax Software. Later, Johnson’s Descent expertise was tapped by GraphSim Entertainment, who contracted him to port Descent III to the Mac OS. Last year, Johnson was contracted by game conversion house Westlake Interactive to handle the Mac conversion of Aspyr Media’s Star Trek: Voyager — Elite Force. All the while Johnson was an aerospace engineer for NASA, where he designed astronaut-training software — he made Mac games in his spare time.
Late in 2000 Johnson took a full-time job with the Macintosh engineering team at graphics card and chipmaker 3dfx Interactive, shortly before the company closed its doors. Since then the question on insiders’ minds has not been if Johnson would find a job, but where and when — with his skills and portfolio, Johnson was coveted by several Mac game concerns.
In addition to the original development of Myth III, Mumbo Jumbo is managing MacPlay’s game conversions for 2001. It appears that those efforts are what Johnson will be helping Mumbo Jumbo with.
Mumbo Jumbo president Mark Dochtermann confirmed that Johnson’s background was key to his hiring.
“Duane brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to Mumbo Jumbo’s Macintosh programming team. His in-depth Macintosh programming skills will enhance the team’s ability to bring high quality product to market to meet MacPlay’s aggressive publishing schedule. We’re also confident that Duane will greatly enhance Mumbo Jumbo’s ability to deliver Mac OS X versions of MacPlay’s 2001 releases,” said Dochtermann.