Rich Whitehouse

Rich Whitehouse is a game designer and programmer. He is well known for several famous game modifications, including the Jumbot and Scientist Hunt mods for Half-Life. Rich is also well known in the video game industry for work on titles in the Jedi Knight series (such as Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, in cooperation with LucasArts) and Soldier of Fortune series, as well as, most recently, Prey.

Game modding
Rich first became publicly involved in game development in December 1997, with his Famkebot mod, the first bot for Quake 2. Rich continued periodic development of the Famkebot for several years, eventually offering a complete rewrite of the source code, and a Capture the Flag version of the bot.

After work on the Famkebot, Rich continued on to work with Half-Life to create the Jumbot and Scientist Hunt. Rich continued development of these projects for roughly 2 years, offering a variety of improvements and new features in each release of the software.

In May 2000, Rich contacted Raven Software about writing a bot for Soldier of Fortune. Studio head Brian Raffel requested that Rich come to the studio to meet the developers of the game and look at the preliminary game source code distribution, and development was underway shortly thereafter. Development of the bot, named hidebot (after Japanese rock star Hideto Matsumoto), eventually led to its distribution at retail, with the release of Soldier of Fortune Gold. Rich began fulltime work at Raven Software shortly after the release of Soldier of Fortune Gold.

During his career in game modding, Rich also contributed to other community efforts, such as Action Half-Life, and did several community interviews.

Raven Software
Following the success of Jedi Knight II, Rich continued on to serve as the multiplayer programmer on Jedi Academy. Rich continued his focus on mod-friendliness, and worked closely with programmer Mike Gummelt and designer Mike Majernik in conceptualizing and implementing new gameplay elements.

Rich moved on to X-Men Legends after the successful completion of Jedi Academy. However, citing the desire to move more into technology and expand his knowledge, he resigned from his position at Raven Software before the completion of X-Men Legends. In the time following this period, Rich dabbled in development for the Game Boy Advance, as well as development of an OpenGL-based game engine.

Human Head Studios
Rich began working at Human Head Studios in 2005, where he served as network and general technology programmer on Prey. Rich once again served a design role in multiplayer development, in addition to his technological duties, organizing in-house testing and feedback sessions. After the completion of Prey, Rich left his full-time position at Human Head Studios, to once again pursue personal interests and further development of his own technology. However, he remained on the 3D Realms forums, where he was often seen assisting users with technical problems.

After his departure, Rich returned to Human Head Studios the following year to assist in the development of technology for an unannounced title. Rich writes that his contributions to this title include robust texture streaming (with real-time texel area determination), hardware vertex blending/animation, and shadowmaps with dynamic frustum grouping/LOD. Following the completion of this technology, Rich left Human Head Studios again.

Industry interim
During his professional career in the video game industry, Rich has continued to produce freeware and games in his spare time. Especially notable among these projects are Hydroball, Ninja Mod, Dixerius, and Quake Royale.

Additionally, Rich is known for having created Nintendo DS ports of Hexen and a NES emulator.

Most recently, Rich has created the, freeware, highly advanced, Final Fantasy VII fan game AVALANCHE. The game has received praise from various online gaming magazines and has great success with the audience it has reached. It was a contender for Indie Game of the year on the gaming mod site Mod DB. The game uses a version of Rich's own R-Cube engine, previously used in Dixerius.

Personal life
Whitehouse has been a game developer since around the age of 15, and started out making modifications for such titles as Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. In 2010, Whitehouse founded Swinecrafters LLC, and has shipped one title so far for the iOS platform called Corporate Fury.