David "Talin" Joiner is an American game programmer, who created games such as ''

The Faery Tale Adventure ''The Faery Tale Adventure'' is a 1987 action role-playing video game designed by David Joiner and published by MicroIllusions for the Amiga, and later ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Sega Genesis. The MS-DOS version is titled ''The Faery ...

'' and ''

Inherit the Earth ''Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb'' is an adventure game developed by The Dreamers Guild and published by New World Computing in 1994. The point and click adventure game features a world of talking humanoid animals, with the gameplay fo ...

'', contributed audio to '' Defender of the Crown II'' (1993), engineering for '' SimCity 4: Rush Hour'' (2003), and '' The Sims 2: University'' (2005).

Career as programmer

Joiner learned

Assembler Assembler may refer to: Arts and media * Nobukazu Takemura, avant-garde electronic musician, stage name Assembler * Assemblers, a fictional race in the ''Star Wars'' universe * Assemblers, an alternative name of the superhero group Champions of A ...

, Fortran, and

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...

programming between 1976-1980 at the

Strategic Air Command Strategic Air Command (SAC) was both a United States Department of Defense Specified Command and a United States Air Force (USAF) Major Command responsible for command and control of the strategic bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile ...

headquarter in Omaha, Nebraska. In his spare time he coded a space war game on terminals. At the location he also became familiar with coding on Commodore PET, and the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

. After leaving the military he joined DataSoft and worked in a professional programmer environment. He then became part of IntelliCreations, and then Mindscape, then begun working on the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

1000 and with

MicroIllusions MicroIllusions, based in Granada Hills, California was a computer game developer and publisher of the home computer era (late 1980s to early 1990s). MicroIllusions, as a company, was a strong supporter of the Amiga and typically released titles on ...

, which started out from a computer store in San Fernando Valley. According to ''The Digital Antiquarian'', "The seeds of MicroIllusions were planted during one day’s idle conversation when Steinert complained to David Joiner that, while the Amiga supposedly had speech synthesis built into its operating system, he had never actually heard his machines talk; [] .. He proved as good as his word within a few hours. Impressed, Steinert asked if he could sell the new program in his store for a straight 50/50 split. When the program sold well, Steinert decided to get into Amiga software development in earnest with the help of Joiner." Joiner then begun working on ''The Faery Tale Adventure'', which took him seven months. MicroIllusions published The Faery Tale Adventure first in 1986. In 1988 he wrote Discovery, an educational music editor related hacked game. Joiner appeared on television of the

Computer Chronicles ''(The) Computer Chronicles'' is an American half-hour television series, which was broadcast from 1983 to 2002 on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) public television and which documented various issues from the rise of the personal computer fro ...

to demonstrate Music-X. He later published under ''Sylvan Technical Arts''. He worked a year on The Sims 2, then left EA. More recently he worked on the user interface of

Google+ Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Publications

In 1998 Joiner published ''Real interactivity in interactive entertainment''.

References

External links

David Joiner's homepageDavid Joiner
at

MobyGames MobyGames is a commercial website that catalogs information on video games and the people and companies behind them via crowdsourcing. This includes nearly 300,000 games for hundreds of platforms. The site is supported by banner ads and a small ...

David Joiner & Music-X Amiga Based Sequencer
(On television show Computer Chronicles) {{DEFAULTSORT:Joiner, David 1958 births American video game designers American video game programmers Electronic Arts employees Google employees Living people Role-playing game designers Software engineers